Drivers & test System

Testing performance - we will be testing the card with the latest drivers available namely Catalyst revision 2.5 with the 7.80 display driver version.

The drivers look and feel just like the older Catalyst driver releases which you are used to however with two changes that are Radeon 9700 specific. The first one is the quality/performance antialiasing settings, you can choose 2X, 4X or 6X multisampled AA modes from the control panel.

The other change is that we noticed new performance/quality options for anisotropic filtering up to 16x. Here's an overview of driver properties, small note everything is in Dutch as the drivers recognized my region.

In the next pages you'll notice the benchmarks and test we ran. Of course the Radeon 9700 Pro outperforms everything available but the plain 9700 is close, very close. And when you crank up FSAA/AA modes the thing will perform at an incredible levels.

The tests - Now, let's see what this videocard has in store for us in terms of 3D performance compared to other videocards.

We did several tests which are made with, 3D Mark 2001 SE, Quake III Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein , CodeMasters Creatures, Unreal 2003 and the Directx 8.1 oriented benchmark called AquaMark. A small note on Aquamark. While the game has been released this benchmark was not. Usage is for press only and therefore I can not give you a download link.

All tests where made in 32 bit colors in resolutions ranging from 1024x768 up-to the Godfather of all gaming resolutions, the 1600x1200 screen mode.