Mobility RADEON 9600, 9200 Beats GeForce FX Go 5600, 5200

by Anton Shilov
06/09/2003 | 02:34 AM

PC Games Hardware Magazine, a German printed magazine has published speed comparison between the latest graphics solutions for mobile computers, the MOBILITY RADEON 9200 and RADEON 9600 as well as the GeForce FX Go5200 and GeForce FX Go5600.

The reviewers compared the mobility graphics cards in applications like Aquanox, Unreal Tournament 2003 and Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. Either NVIDIA has very poor drivers for their GeForce FX Go5200/5600 or they sacrificed too lot of performance in order to achieve lower power consumption of their mobility parts, but at this very point ATI’s MOBILITY RADEON 9200/9600 graphics solutions appear to be a lot faster than the competitors.

The journalists used Toshiba Satellite 5200-902 (Intel Pentium 4-M 2.40MHz, i845MP, 512MB of RAM, GeForce FX 5600), Peacock Freeliner XP 2500+ (AMD Athlon XP 2500+, VIA KT333, 512MB of RAM, MOBILITY RADEON 9600), Acer Travelmate 800 (Intel Pentium-M 1.60MHz, i855, 512MB of RAM, MOBILITY RADEON 9000) and Medion Titanium MD6200 (Intel Pentium 4-M 2.60MHz, SiS648, 512MB of RAM, GeForce FX 5200) for comparison.

For precise numbers please check the latest issue of PC Games Hardware Magazine, now let us summarize the ideas:

• In Aquanox 2 Peacock Freeliner as well as Acer Travelmate appeared to be faster than solutions by Toshiba and Medion both in 1024x768 mode as well as when using FSAA 2x and Anisotropic Filtering 4x.
• In Unreal Tournament 2003 Peacock Freeliner XP 2500+ also appeared to be faster compared to even a desktop computer based on AMD Athlon XP 3000+ and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600. Toshiba Satellite 5200-902 with the GeForce FX 5600 inside performed equally compared to a desktop computer based on the RADEON 9600 and AMD Athlon XP 3000+ what is a bit funny. Acer Travelmate 800 with MOBILITY RADEON 9000 outperformed Medion Titanium MD6200.
• When benchmarking in Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, Peacock Freeliner XP 2500+ came first, Toshiba Satellite 5200-902 was second, Acer Travelmate 800 received the third place and Medion Titanium MD6200 was the last.

To sum up, ATI’s mobile solutions are in general faster than rivals compared using these particular benchmarks.