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SAPPHIRE RADEON 9200 REVIEW

"Sapphire Radeon 9200 review testing the Sapphire Radeon 9200 against the XFX GeForce 5200, MSI GeForce4 Ti4200 and the Gainward GeForce4 mx440. Software used during testing was:- 3dmark 2001 SE, 3dmark 2003, Quake 3 Arena, Serious Sam SE and Unreal Tournament 2003."

Today we are testing the latest budget video card from Sapphire the Radeon 9200 Atlantis. This video card is a "Powered-by-ATI" video card which was released to compete against the latest video card from Nvidia the GeForce 5200. It was expected that the Radeon 9200 would also support dx9 however I can confirm that the Radeon 9200 only supports dx8. The Radeon 9200 is really just a Radeon 9000 with x8 agp support.

The Sapphire Radeon 9200 and the XFX GeForce 5200 both share very similar specifications. They both operate at 250mhz core and have a large 128mb of 400mhz ddr memory. The GeForce 5200 has the big advantage of being fully dx9 compatible but the Radeon 9200 has full vivo support.

In this test we will compare the Radeon 9200 against it's Nvidia rival the GeForce 5200. The test will also feature the more expensive GeForce4 Ti4200 and the budget GeForce4 MX 440 for comparison. Being the most expensive video card in the test it is expected that the GeForce4 Ti4200 will win. The GeForce4 MX 440 is expected to be last in the test due to it's limited dx7 specifications and it only has 64mb memory.

THE SAPPHIRE RADEON 9200 ATLANTIS INCLUDES THE FOLLOWING FEATURES:-

CHARISMA ENGINE II:-

Four parallel rendering pipelines process up to 1.1 billion pixels per second. High performance 2nd generation hardware transform & lighting engine. Advanced vertex shader support for the latest programmable effects.

SMARTSHADER™

Full support for Microsoft® DirectX® 8.1 programmable pixel and vertex shaders in hardware. 1.4 Pixel Shaders support up to 22 instructions and up to 6 textures per rendering pass. 1.1 Vertex Shaders support vertex programs up to 128 instructions. Programmable shaders provide enhanced 3D effects in over 100 existing and upcoming game titles. Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL via extensions.

SMOOTHVISION™

Image quality enhancement features for Direct3D™ and OpenGL ® applications. Programmable full-scene anti-aliasing supports 2 to 6 samples with user selectable performance and quality modes. Advanced anisotropic filtering supports 2 to 16 samples for high quality texture rendering with minimal performance impact.

HYPER Z™ II

Lossless Z-Buffer Compression and Fast Z-Buffer Clear reduce memory bandwidth by up to 25%

VIDEO FEATURES

Hardware accelerated de-blocking of Internet video streams. Delivers industry leading DVD playback. Integrated MPEG-2 decode including iDCT and motion compensation for top quality DVD with lowest CPU usage. Unique adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing feature combines the best elements of the "bob" and "add-field" (weave) techniques. YUV to RGB color space conversion. Back-end scaler delivers top quality playback. 4-tap horizontal and vertical filtering. Upscaling and downscaling. Filtered display of images up to 1920 pixels wide. Hardware mirroring for flipping video images in video conferencing systems. Supports 8-bit alpha blending and video keying for effective overlay of video and graphics.

EXTRA FEATURES

Supports the new AGP 8X standard (2.0 GB/sec). VIVO ( Video In & Video Out ). 128-bit floating-point color precision allows for a greater range of colors and brightness.

NAME	CHIPSET	GPU SPEED	MEMORY	AGP SPEED
SAPPHIRE RADEON 9200	RV280	250mhz	128Mb 400mhz DDR	8x
MSI GEFORCE4 TI4200	NV28	250mhz	128Mb 512mhz DDR	8x
XFX GEFORCE 5200	NV34	250mhz	128Mb 400mhz DDR	8x
GAINWARD GEFORCE4 MX 440	NV17	270mhz	64Mb 400mhz DDR	4x
NAME	CHIPSET	GPU SPEED	MEMORY	AGP SPEED

GENERAL SYSTEM INFORMATION

PROCESSOR	AMD ATHLON XP 2500
VIDEO CARD	SAPPHIRE RADEON 9200
	XFX GEFORCE 5200
	MSI GEFORCE4 TI4200
	GAINWARD GEFORCE4 MX 440
ATI DRIVER	CATALYST v3.5
NVIDIA DRIVER	DETONATOR v44.03
MOTHERBOARD	ASROCK K7S8X
MEMORY	512MB CRUCIAL PC2700 DDR
OPERATING SYSTEM	WINDOWS XP SERVICE PACK 1
DIRECTX VERSION	v9.0a

	RADEON 9200	GEFORCE4 Ti4200	GEFORCE 5200	GEFORCE4 MX 440
3DMARK 2001 SE	6904	10939	7656	6367
GAME 1 - CAR CHASE (LQ)	91	163	103	110
GAME 1 - CAR CHASE (HQ)	49	58	48	49
GAME 2 - DRAGOTHIC (LQ)	103	196	124	106
GAME 2 - DRAGOTHIC (HQ)	58	106	66	50
GAME 3 - LOBBY (LQ)	111	145	121	111
GAME 3 - LOBBY (HQ)	53	66	59	55
GAME 4 - NATURE	32	65	35	N/A
FILL RATE (SINGLE)	512	884	628	444
FILL RATE (MULTI)	987	1933	731	846
HIGH POLYGON (1 LIGHT)	19	48	33	32
HIGH POLYGON (8 LIGHTS)	4	10	5	6
ENVIROMENT MAPPING	119	169	78	N/A
DOT3 MAPPING	64	126	74	67
VERTEX SHADER	73	83	46	51
PIXEL SHADER	79	105	88	N/A
ADVANCED PIXEL SHADER	74	83	30	N/A
POINT SPRITES	13	26	12	10

COMMENT - "As expected the MSI GeForce4 Ti4200 takes an early victory over all of the other video cards. The Sapphire Radeon 9200 puts in a poor performance with the game benchmarks but the synthetic tests are very good. The limited technology of the Gainward GeForce4 MX 440 is holding it back badly and it's unable to complete 4 tests so finished last. The biggest surprise was the poor vertex shader and advanced pixel shader performance of the XFX GeForce 5200."

	RADEON 9200	GEFORCE4 Ti4200	GEFORCE 5200	GEFORCE4 MX 440
3DMARK 2003	1098	1481	1431	261
WINGS OF FURY	64	100	79	36
BATTLE OF PROXYCON	7	9	7	N/A
TROLL'S LAIR	8	9	6	N/A
MOTHER NATURE	N/A	N/A	8	N/A
CPU SCORE	387	468	464	N/A
CPU TEST 1	47	50	49	N/A
CPU TEST 2	6	9	9	N/A
FILL RATE (SINGLE)	492	680	617	439
FILL RATE (MULTI)	977	1786	708	813
VERTEX SHADER	7	5	4	N/A
PIXEL SHADER V2.0	N/A	N/A	7	N/A
RAGTROLL	4	6	4	N/A

COMMENT - "The dx9 support of the XFX GeForce 5200 really shows with this benchmark, it's the ONLY video card which is able to complete all of the tests. The Sapphire Radeon 9200 puts in a good performance and if it supported dx9 it's final score would of been very good. The limited technology of the Gainward GeForce4 MX 440 shows once again, it was only able to complete 3 of the tests which is the reason for it's low score."

SAPPHIRE RADEON 9200 REVIEW INDEX

PAGE 1 - SAPPHIRE RADEON 9200 INTRODUCTION

PAGE 2 - QUAKE III ARENA

PAGE 3 - SERIOUS SAM SE AND UNREAL TOURNAMENT 2003

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