ATI’s Radeon 9700 (R300) – Crowning the New King

SMOOTHVISION 2.0 - Anti-Aliasing Performance

We didn't have much time with the Radeon 9700 so we couldn't run a full suite of AA tests nor take screen shots, but we did run a few numbers under UT2003 and Quake III Arena just to whet your appetite:

Unreal Tournament 2003 w/ Anti-Aliasing DM-Antalus 1600x1200x32 High Detail Normalized to GeForce4 Ti 4600 ATI Radeon 9700 (4X) GeForce4 Ti 4600 (4X) 2.51 1.00 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3

At 1600x1200 with 4X AA enabled, the Radeon 9700 is 2.51x faster than the GeForce4 Ti 4600. While the frame rates are high enough to be playable, even the almighty Radeon 9700 would need to back down to 1280x1024 with 4X AA enabled to be smooth as silk.

Unreal Tournament 2003 w/ Anti-Aliasing DM-Asbestos 1600x1200x32 High Detail Normalized to GeForce4 Ti 4600 ATI Radeon 9700 (4X) GeForce4 Ti 4600 (4X) 2.28 1.00 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 3

A 2.28x performance advantage here; it's a good thing that SMOOTHVISION now employs a multisampling algorithm otherwise the performance advantage wouldn't be nearly as great.

Quake III Arena w/ Anti-Aliasing 'demo four' 1600x1200x32 High Quality Normalized to GeForce4 Ti 4600 ATI Radeon 9700 (4X) GeForce4 Ti 4600 (4X) 2.49 1.00 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 0

We end, once again, with Quake III Arena and the Radeon 9700's 2.49x performance advantage. Granted that at 1600x1200 this is more of a memory bandwidth test than anything, which the Radeon 9700 has about twice what the GeForce4 has, but it's still impressive.

As we mentioned before, this is more of a preview and we'll run through a much more thorough set of tests in our actual review of the shipping Radeon 9700.