Conclusion

While it’s based on a four-year old game engine, Call of Duty is quite capable of pushing today’s latest hardware. We saw tangible performance benefits for the RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB and RADEON 9800 XT, while the RADEON 9500 PRO continues to represent the best performance among mainstream cards, despite the fact that it’s a year old itself. Even though we’ve been praising it since it first arrived on the scene last year, we never imagined it would be this successful for so long. ATI’s decision to stick with 600MHz DDR memory for the RADEON 9600 XT could certainly be argued as being rather shortsighted, if not flat-out disappointing.

The RADEON 9700 PRO and RADEON 9800 remain the best values if you’re looking to maximize price with excellent performance, although the latter has practically disappeared since we published our review in August -- when ATI wants to phase out a card, they certainly don’t waste any time doing it! RADEON 9700 PRO’s can be found for just under $250, which is a good price considering the performance you’re getting.

If you don’t want to spend more than $200, clearly the RADEON 9600 XT is the best choice among the cards we’ve looked at today. You might want to avoid the Built By ATI card however, and go with one of the cards from Sapphire or PowerColor, both of which will offer custom SKUs which ship with faster memory (just be sure to read the fine print if that’s what you’re looking for). 9500 PROs are practically impossible to find, and if you do find one it’s likely priced over $200, taking it out of your price range and priced too close to the 9700 PRO. The RADEON 8500 (and we’d bet the 8500 LE) continue to be a better solution than the RADEON 9000 PRO.

So there you have it, the first part of our findings with Call of Duty. NVIDIA’s batting next, and we’re sure many of you will be keeping score to see who comes out on top. Stay tuned folks!