by Alexey Stepin
06/17/2003 | 11:33 PM
As you know, the AGP 8x standard proposed by Intel can provide twice the bandwidth of the currently mainstream AGP 4x. Curiously enough, the unpretentious SiS was the first to implement this standard in its Xabre graphics chips family just over a year ago, while the graphics giants, ATI Technologies and NVIDIA Corporation, were a bit slower. Next came ATI with its brilliant RADEON 9700 PRO, the first graphics chip in this world to feature DirectX 9.0 support. NVIDIA followed shortly with its NV18 and NV28 chips. So, only the value cards from ATI in the RADEON 8500/9100 and RADEON 9000 families (R200 and R250 chips, respectively) couldn’t boast the new standard for a while.
But now, a new chip (RV280) comes instead of RV250. In fact, it only differs from the predecessor by its AGP 8x support, nothing else. ATI christened this chip as RADEON 9200, which is confusing enough, although such confusion has become a trademark of ATI: the 9100 graphics chip family (R200) performs nearly always faster than cards based on RV250/RV280 (RADEON 9000/9200). An innocent user might be misled to think that RADEON 9200 is faster in 3D applications than RADEON 9100, but that’s absolutely wrong. Moreover, we have the same picture with RADEON 9500 PRO and RADEON 9600 PRO: the 9600 PRO based solutions are always slower than the 9500 PRO based ones. Let this be the shame of all marketing folk at ATI…
Now, let’s discuss the technical characteristics of RV280 graphics chip.
Closer Look at RV280: What RADEON 9200 Has and Can?
As you see we have a typical value graphics chip with DirectX 8.1 support and some interesting features like FullStream technology. Unfortunately, RealPlayer only supports this technology so far. DixX Player, which is a more popular multimedia player from the DivX bundle, also supports it since 2.1 version, but only in cards based on R300/R350 and RV350 chips.
We are very grateful to Gigabyte Technology, which is more known for its mainboards, for the opportunity to test their graphics adapter. Today we are going to pay special attention to their value graphics card with an exotic name: Maya II R9200. This product comes to retail stores in a dark-colored paper box:
The box contained the following items:
As we’ve got a pre-sale version of the product, there was no original user manual and CD with drivers. The manufacturer was so kind to offer us a CD-R disk with them.
Serious Sam is a rather old game, but the engine from Croteam looks quite pretty. This game has beautiful graphics, but doesn’t put too much demand onto the hardware and works smoothly even on value graphics cards.
When you take the card, you will right away pay attention to extremely simple and compact PCB, which has no excessive details. The silver-colored pin heatsink stands out against the traditional Gigabyte’s dark-blue background. Yes, the card has no active cooling system. This heatsink should be quite enough here, if you are not into extreme overclocking. The card carries eight memory chips, Hynix HY5DV281622AT-5 with 5ns access time. Total memory amount is 128MB. The memory works at 200MHz (400MHz DDR) and you can hardly overclock it. Anyway, we will discuss overclocking issues later on.
The core works at 250MHz. As we will soon find out, graphics chip overclocking is also impossible. But even at its regular frequency, the graphics chip heatsink heated up a lot as well as memory chips.
As you see, the PCB lacks some elements. For example, capacitors are not installed in the upper right corner. To the right of the chip there is empty space for Rage Theater chip, probably left for a VIVO version of the product. The 4-pin connector below the D-Sub one is not present, too. We usually see such connectors in audio cards: they serve for inputting analog signal from a CD-ROM drive or TV-tuner. The Rage Theater chip itself is not so important for RADEON 9000/9200 as RV250/280 chips are two-headed (i.e. support dual-display configurations) and can output TV-signal without additional controllers.
At the back side of Maya II R9200 there are only a few voltage regulators.
This card is a pre-sale sample, so its PCB has REV0 2 chip revision, which you can see in the snapshot.
The CD-R disk we received from the manufacturer contained an utility called V-Tuner. It is a system monitoring and overclocking tool. Since RADEON 9000, unlike its elder, PRO, brother, is locked against overclocking, we supposed that Gigabyte Maya II R9200 will also be impossible to overclock. And we were not mistaken: Gigabyte’s utility was a bright, but useless toy. We also tried to overclock the card with the latest version of RivaTuner, but to no avail. Increased frequencies of the memory and graphics chip didn’t tell on the benchmarks results: the card’s BIOS seemed to be resetting them to the nominal values automatically. Probably, V-Tuner is intended for other cards that don’t have anti-overclocking protection. In fact, this protection system seems proper here as the graphics chip has no active cooler and memory chips are not cooled at all. If there were no protection system like that, an unsophisticated user could overclock the card to death.
As for image quality, it was good enough in all modes supported by our display (we used Hitachi CM772). In any case, we noticed no difference as compared to TYAN Tachyon R9500 PRO.
Overall, Gigabyte Maya II R9200 graphics card leaves a nice impression, although boasts nothing extraordinary except attractive looks.
We decided to test our Gigabyte Maya II R9200 together with RADEON 9000 PRO and RADEON 8500 based cards from ATI and the value graphics solution from NVIDIA: GeForce4 MX440. As overclocking is impossible, we ran all the cards at their regular frequencies.
The following system was used as a testbed:
We used the cards in the AGP 4x mode. To prove that AGP 8x brings no performance boost, we tested Gigabyte’s card in Unreal Tournament 2003 and 3DMark 2001SE on an i875P-based platform (Pentium 4 2.40C). For a better comparison, we also included Quake 3 Arena. You can see the results of AGP 8x tests in the end of the review.
Here’s the list of our benchmarks:
We excluded Codecult CodeCreatures Benchmark Pro and Futuremark 3DMark03 as they are too difficult for value graphics solutions to pass.
Every gaming benchmark was run with the highest graphics quality settings. We set 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions in the “raw speed” mode and 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024 resolutions in the 2xAA+8xAF mode. We didn’t enable 4x anti-aliasing, as value cards do not provide enough gaming performance in this mode for comfortable playing, especially in modern games.
Among OpenGL applications we count those that use Quake3 engine. They are: Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast and Quake3 Arena. Besides, we used Serious Sam: The Second Encounter that supports both: OpenGL and Direct3D API.
The good old RADEON 8500 wins the test without anisotropic filtering and full-screen anti-aliasing. No wonder it did with its two rendering pipelines and higher fillrate. RADEON 9200 is second from behind, because of its slower-clocked memory. GeForce4 MX440 loses just a little to RADEON 9200: the efficient OpenGL driver from NVIDIA helps the old architecture of the chip run rather fast.
Anisotropic filtering brings some changes into the ranks: GeForce4 MX440 takes the third place as it has more efficient 2x FSAA algorithms and low anisotropy level – 2x.
This game has more complex and nicer-looking graphics and thus puts higher workload onto the graphics card. Here are the results:
There are no great changes in the picture: RADEON 8500 remains on top, while RADEON 9200 defeated GeForce4 MX440 only in the first test and only in 1024x768 resolution. Well, we can only admit that NVIDIA programmers did a great job on the OpenGL driver, which was developed together with the software guys from Silicon Graphics, the founder of this standard.
This game uses the latest engine from ID Software. In lower resolutions this game is often indifferent to the graphics card and shows the same speed.
As you see, in lower resolutions of the “raw” mode the game runs with the same speed on any graphics card. The speed is limited either by the CPU, or by some peculiarities of the game engine. But in higher resolutions we see the following picture: RADEON 8500 is in the lead, followed by RADEON 9000 PRO and GeForce4 MX440. RADEON 9200 is the last one here.
The exciting situation takes place in 1280x1024 with enabled FSAA and anisotropic filtering: GeForce4 MX440 beats RADEON 8500, although it is defeated by the latter in all other modes. Maybe RADEON 8500 has a really hard time here because of the higher anisotropy level equal to 8x. Besides, anti-aliasing by R200 and RV250 takes more resources than on NV17/NV18.
The engine of this game is more progressive than the one from ID Software. So, we can evaluate the performance of the value cards in present-day gaming applications quite objectively here.
RADEON 9000 PRO outperforms RADEON 8500 thanks to certain optimizations ATI included into RV250, while RADEON 9200 is faster than GeForce4 MX440. Actually, there is no difference in the architecture of RADEON 9000 PRO and 9200, but the latter lacks fast memory: in 1280x1024 resolution it loses its ground, falling just 1.3fps behind GeForce4 MX440.
By the way, Serious Sam can render four textures per pass if the graphics chip allows. In our case, ATI chips do allow this, while GeForce4 MX440 can only render two textures per pass. This fact must have affected the results of the test.
We have two games using DirectX: Unreal Tournament 2003 and Splinter Cell. Both are quite new and load any graphics solution quite tangibly taking up all its resources.
Once again, RADEON 9200 lacks fast memory: it only slightly defeats GeForce4 MX440 at low resolutions with FSAA and AA. The amount of memory – 128MB – is of less importance here than its working frequency.
RADEON 8500 is invincible thanks to its two rendering pipelines.
This game uses a modified engine from UT 2003, but it is even hungrier for graphics chip power than Unreal Tournament 2003. Here are the results:
Splinter Cell is harder than UT 2003, being a stress for any modern graphics card, especially the value ones. GeForce4 MX440 wins the lowest resolution with anisotropy. In all the other modes, it takes its proper place: at the bottom of the line. Its old architecture simply cannot handle such workloads. We should admit, though, that none of the participating graphics cards showed any acceptable playability.
Due to some problems with the drivers, RADEON 9000 PRO and 8500 couldn’t turn on FSAA and anisotropic filtering in 1280x1024 resolution.
Now, let’s run the popular benchmark from FutureMark. Here are the results obtained in 3DMark2001 SE:
Rather a confusing picture: RADEON 8500 is the best in the “raw” mode, while RADEON 9000 is better with enabled FSAA and AA due to the optimizations in the RV250 architecture. RADEON 9200 loses to GeForce4 MX440, notwithstanding its 128MB of memory.
Some things changed: RADEON 9200 goes neck and neck with GeForce4 MX440 in the “raw” mode, but loses its ground in the other mode, because the GeForce is under favorable conditions there. RADEON 8500 is beyond any competition.
Once again, RADEON 9200 is better than GeForce4 MX440 in the light mode, but worse – in the hard one. RADEON 8500 and 9000 PRO alternately reach the top.
GeForce4 MX440 cannot pass the Nature test, as it doesn’t support pixel shaders. RADEON 9200 was overall slower than other ATI cards for understandable reasons, while RADEON 9000 PRO was the best with enabled FSAA and anisotropic filtering. By the way, RADEON 9200 tried to compete on more or less equal terms with RADEON 8500 in this test in high resolutions, which was possible due to some improvements made by ATI in RV250/280 chips.
Overall, Gigabyte Maya II R9200 proved up to our expectations: it performed comparably to GeForce4 MX440. Its memory is too slow to let it reach RADEON 8500/9000 PRO, so that even its higher size (128MB) wouldn’t help, as you see. The resume: a value card doesn’t need a lot of slow memory. It could be better if the card featured 64MB of faster memory.
We undertook a small investigation trying to answer the question: what are the advantages of AGP 8x? The testbed was different this time. We used ABIT IC7 mainboard (i875P chipset), Pentium 4 2.4C (800MHz QPB, Hyper-Threading) processors, 512MB PC3200 memory onboard. The system worked in Microsoft Windows XP. We used ver.3.4 Catalyst drivers. Here are the results:
As you see, there is no noticeable advantage of the AGP 8x mode compared with the AGP 4x: certain divergences fit into the measurement error range. The Nature test from 3DMark2001 SE with enabled anti-aliasing was the hardest trial and showed the advantage of 128MB memory: RADEON 9200 outran RADEON 9000 PRO in higher resolutions. Strangely enough, we didn’t see this on the Athlon XP platform.
Besides, you may notice that there are no differences in performance of RADEON 9000 PRO and RADEON 9200-based graphics cards in Direct3D applications in certain totally different modes. For instance, when we turned FSAA 2x in 1024x768 and higher screen-resolutions in Direct3D software and then tested with enabled and disabled anisotropic filtering, we got similar results. Since there is no such anomaly in OpenGL application we tested, we believe this to be a bug in drivers. It may appear only on the i875P platform with Windows XP and may be cured in next releases of ATI’s drivers, but it existed in our case.
So, we have just proven once again that AGP 8x, which can theoretically ensure twice higher bandwidth, has no advantages over AGP 4x today. The amount of data pumped along the bus must be too small to load it to the full. Today, all the textures usually fit into the local graphics memory and the AGP bus only serves to transfer geometry information. In the future, the amount of textures used in games may become high enough to require AGP texturing, but most probably PCI Express, a faster bus, will have come to computer systems by that time, making AGP 8x inadequate.
Gigabyte Maya II R9200 left a twofold impression. The product is very well-done, although the passive cooling system works at the breaking point. Fortunately, this card cannot be overclocked: it won’t die in the hands of some unfortunate user. The 128MB of slow (200MHz) memory don’t give RADEON 9200 any advantages except those modes with high resolution and enabled full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. But even this advantage is a mirage: you cannot reach an acceptable playability in such modes on a value graphics card.
AGP 8x support doesn’t provide any advantages. The card performed similarly in both AGP 4x and AGP 8x modes. The support of pixel and vertex shaders makes RADEON 9200 a more appealing buy than GeForce4 MX440, which doesn’t support pixel shaders at all. So, if you are somewhat pressed for money, but want to play rather new games, RADEON 9200 may be the choice for you. Its price is about $85; it supports DirectX 8.1 and runs pretty fast in most games.
Highs:
Lows: