SAPPHIRE RADEON 9600 XT

"Sapphire Radeon 9600 XT review against the Sapphire Radeon 9600. Software used for benchmarking was:- 3dmark 2001 SE, 3dmark 2003, PowerVR, GL Excess and Nvidia Dawn."

The terrestrial plane has never been touched by technology the likes which has arrived today. Effects afforded by the world's most complex VPU's in the ATi RADEON™ 9600 XT core, heralded as belonging to the celestial realm alone, now make their way to the hands of earthlings.

128MB DDR high performance two-channel DDR memory interface accelerates the latest 3D applications. Optimized 128-bit 2D engine with support for new WindowsXP GDI extensions.

3rd Generation Visual Processing Unit comprised of 4 rendering pipelines and 2 geometry engines.

Fully compliant with PC 2002 requirements.

Supports the AGP 8X and AGP 4x standard.

Full support for DirectX® 9.0 and the latest OpenGL® functionality.

New SMARTSHADER™ 2.0 technology allows users to experience complex, movie-quality effects in next-generation 3D games and applications

SMOOTHVISION™ 2.1 technology enhances image quality by removing jagged edges and bringing out fine texture detail, without compromising performance.

128-bit floating-point color precision allows for a greater range of colors and brightness.

NOTE THE SAPPHIRE RADEON 9600 XT FEATURED IN THIS REVIEW IS THE FIREBLADE VERSION. THIS MEANS THE MEMORY HAS BEEN INCREASED FROM 600MHZ TO 650MHZ FOR A NICE SPEED BOOST!

NVIDIA DAWN 1024x768 70 42 1024x768 (4xAA & 8xAF) 39 23 NVIDIA DAWN ULTRA 1024x768 25 16 1024x768 (4xAA & 8xAF) 18 11 SAPPHIRE RADEON 9600 XT SAPPHIRE RADEON 9600 COMMENT - "The Nvidia Dawn was created by Nvidia to promote the GeForce, we are using it to benchmark the two ATI video cards who are Nvidia's rivals. As you can see the basic Dawn demo is playable on both video cards however with 4xaa/8xaf enabled only the Sapphire Radeon 9600 XT can deliver performance above 30fps. When using the demanding Dawn Ultra demo both video cards fail to reach 30fps for smooth frame rates."

POWERVR BENCHMARK DEFERRED SHADING 20 6 FABLEMARK 36 23 TEMPLEMARK 164 106 VILLAGEMARK 144 88 SAPPHIRE RADEON 9600 XT SAPPHIRE RADEON 9600 COMMENT - "Here we are again using software designed to promote video cards with nothing to do with ATI. Both video cards struggle with the DX9 benchmark deferred shading which tests the Quad Shading performance of the video cards. The Sapphire Radeon 9600 XT manages a performance increase of 70% over the Sapphire Radeon 9600 which is impressive. FableMark makes use of stencil buffer shading and you can see the Sapphire Radeon 9600 XT gains a 37% increase in performance over the Sapphire Radeon 9600." BENCHMARK SETTINGS 1024x768 Resolution Vsync Disabled COMMENT - "Things start to get very interesting with the Templemark benchmark which tests the multi-texturing and bumpmapping performance of the video cards using an egyptian scene. Here we clearly see the 36% increase in performance the Sapphire Radeon 9600 XT has over the Sapphire Radeon 9600. Villagemark is a benchmark which uses a village scene with lots of overlapped buildings to test for overdraw reduction and texturing performance. Once again the Sapphire Radeon 9600 XT shows a clear advantage over the Sapphire Radeon 9600 with an impressive 39% increase in performance."

SYNTHETIC BENCHMARKS 3DMARK 2001 SE 12465 8753 3DMARK 2003 3899 2430 GLEXCESS 9148 6864 SAPPHIRE RADEON 9600 XT SAPPHIRE RADEON 9600 COMMENT - "The Sapphire Radeon 9600 XT manages a performance increase of 30% over the Sapphire Radeon 9600 with 3dmark 2001 SE. The performance difference rises to 38% with 3dmark 2003 and then falls to a 25% difference with GLExcess. Therefore the Sapphire Radeon 9600 XT delivers great performance with all 3 benchmarks." BENCHMARK SETTINGS 3DMARK 2001 SE 1024x768 Resolution 32Bit color D3D Hardware T&L Antialiasing Disabled Double Frame Buffer Compressed Texture Format 24Bit Z-Buffer Depth 3DMARK 2003 1024x768 Resolution No Pixel Processing Optimal Texture Filtering 4x Max Anisotropy Optimal Vertex Shaders No Repeat Tests No Fixed Framerate GLEXCESS5 1024x768 Resolution Scene 1 Intro Scene 2 Waver Scene 3 Facescape Scene 4 Exploding Logo