RADEON X800 PRO Performance with Pentium 4 May 30, 2004 Brandon Sandman Bell

Introduction

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As promised, today we’re here to take a look at the performance of ATI’s RADEON X800 PRO with Intel Pentium 4 processors. Based on our preview from the beginning of this month, we already know the X800 PRO is fast, nearly doubling the performance of RADEON 9800 XT, and at a price point that is $100 less than ATI’s high-end RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition. This performance is provided by its 12-pipeline R420 core, which is clocked at 475MHz and its 256-bit memory interface operating at 900MHz.

With all this graphics horsepower however, there are cases where the X800 PRO is held up by the performance of the CPU in the system. We saw this repeatedly in Epic’s latest shooter, Unreal Tournament 2004, and in other titles such Splinter Cell and even Far Cry. In these cases performance was the same across multiple graphics settings and screen resolutions.

Being CPU-limited isn’t necessarily a bad thing. From an optimists’ viewpoint, eye candy features such as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are “free”, meaning they come with no performance hit. You can also crank up the texture and geometry detail and screen resolution with little or no drop in performance. All of these settings combined produce an excellent picture. The downside is frame rate; with a faster CPU you could have all the visuals cranked up to their maximums and achieve higher performance. Basically, you aren’t getting the most bang from your buck.

This situation is exacerbated by the fact that for the most part, the RADEON X800 visually looks the same as its predecessors. ATI has improved the efficiency of its SMOOTHVISION engine in RADEON X800, including support for new resolutions, but little else has changed. In fact, when the anisotropic filtering “cheating” fiasco broke a week ago, one of ATI’s defenses was that they’d merely adopted the RADEON 9600’s filtering algorithm. And regarding the RADEON X800’s other new features, temporal AA and 3Dc, both of these could potentially be integrated into existing RADEON cards like the RADEON 9800 XT, albeit with slightly lesser quality in the case of 3Dc. In fact, ATI is expected to incorporate temporal AA for all DX9 cards in an upcoming CATALYST release.

These factors make the upgrade decision a tough one. Do you pair your Pentium 4 2.4GHz with a RADEON X800 PRO even though it’s likely to be CPU-bound in a lot of cases? Or perhaps you should save a little money and get the RADEON 9800 XT instead? How much of a performance difference would you see between the two? Hopefully this article will help you answer these types of questions in addition to highlighting the processor crossover point, where the higher clock speeds are able to feed the X800 PRO more sufficiently.

The processors

Once again we wanted to include the widest range of clock frequencies possible. To keep things simple, we focused mainly on the 800MHz “C” processors from Intel, but we also included a 2.0A Northwood Pentium 4 chip to represent the slower processors. We wanted to include a 3.4GHz Pentium 4, but our Prescott processor wasn’t properly recognized by any of our motherboards. Since it’s an engineering sample with an unlocked multiplier, it’s a little different than your typical Prescott 3.4GHz processor. None of the motherboards recognized its 17.0 multiplier, running it at 14.0 instead in all cases. As soon as we get this resolved we’ll update the article with 3.4GHz numbers.

Test conditions

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System Setup

Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz

ASUS P4S800D-E Deluxe

512MB OCZ EL PC3200 (DDR400) SDRAM

ATI RADEON X800 PRO
ATI RADEON 9800 XT
Driver version CATALYST 4.5

30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive

Windows XP Professional SP1

DirectX 9.0b

Benchmarks

Lock On: Modern Air Combat (Mig-29 custom demo)
Call of Duty (demo0032 custom demo)
Unreal Tournament 2004 (T3 custom demo)
IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles (The Black Death track)
Splinter Cell (FS custom demo)
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (Beyond3D custom demo)
Halo: Combat Evolved (stock benchmark)

Call of Duty 4xAA/8xAF

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Call of Duty – OpenGL

Notes

Performance scales appropriately in our testing with Call of Duty, the only case where we’re really CPU-bound with the X800 PRO is with the Pentium 4 2.0A processor. In this case, performance is largely unchanged until we hit 1600x1200.

IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles 4xAA

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IL-2 Sturmovik: FB - OpenGL

Notes

As we’ve mentioned in previous articles, flight simulators tend to stress overall system performance rather than individual components such as the CPU or graphics card. Because of this, you don’t see the large differences between various high-end cards (9800 PRO versus 9800 XT for example) as you do in other titles. This is why the RADEON 9800 XT Pentium 4 systems are able to keep up with their X800 counterparts.

IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles 4xAA/8xAF

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IL-2 Sturmovik: FB - OpenGL

Notes

Once AF is enabled in addition to anti-aliasing, the X800 PRO Pentium 4 systems begin to overtake the RADEON 9800 XT rigs. The two X800 configurations at speeds of 3GHz or greater perform in their own class above the 2.4C and 2.8C.

Lock On: Modern Air Combat

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Lock On: Modern Air Combat – Direct3D

Notes

We’re held back by the processor with the systems at 2.8GHz or lower with the X800, the 2.0A in particular offers little improvement over the equivalent system paired with ATI’s RADEON 9800 XT even at the highest resolutions. So you’ll really want a 3GHz system or faster if you’re a heavy LOMAC player and want the most optimal performance from X800 PRO.

Lock On: Modern Air Combat 4xAA

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Lock On: Modern Air Combat – Direct3D

Splinter Cell

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Splinter Cell – Direct3D

Tomb Raider

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Tomb Raider – Direct3D

Notes

Whether you’re running a 2.4C or a Pentium 4 3.2GHz, performance between the systems is the same. As you can see, this also applies to the RADEON 9800 XT, we’re graphics limited there too.

Tomb Raider 4xAA

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Tomb Raider – Direct3D

UT 2004 4xAA

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Unreal Tournament 2004

Notes

Even with a 3.2GHz P4, we’re CPU-limited in UT 2004 up until 1600x1200. Also keep in mind that this is with AA enabled.

UT 2004 4xAA/8xAF

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Unreal Tournament 2004

Notes

Not much has changed with 4xAA and 8xAF enabled, the net result hasn’t changed much. We’re still CPU bound even at 3.2GHz with ATI’s RADEON X800 PRO until very high resolutions.

Far Cry

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Far Cry – Direct3D

Far Cry 4xAA

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Far Cry – Direct3D

Far Cry 4xAA/8xAF

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Far Cry – Direct3D

Halo	Page:: ( 16 / 17 )

Halo – Direct3D

Conclusion

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ATI’s RADEON X800 PRO is an incredibly powerful graphics card, its 12-pipeline graphics core and high-speed GDDR3 memory gives it significantly more performance than previous graphics cards. But, if you pair it with a slower processor, it can offer little or no performance improvement over RADEON 9800 XT. Think of the RADEON X800 PRO like a sports car, if you pair it with small tires, it will provide minimum performance over your typical econo box or sedan.

In this case, a 14” tire classification would definitely apply to the Pentium 4 2.0A GHz, this setup routinely disappointed. The 2.4C and 2.8C GHz X800 systems were CPU-bound in multiple cases as well. Because of this, you’re really going to want a 3GHz Pentium 4 system or preferably, even faster, for the RADEON X800 PRO to truly shine.

Keep in mind that this varies depending on the title. If you’re a flight sim fanatic with a RADEON 9800 PRO or XT, you should definitely check out the LOMAC and IL-2 results. These titles are system hogs, so it may not be worth your effort to upgrade just yet. UT engine games like UT 2004 and Splinter Cell are very heavily CPU-limited so you’ll definitely want a faster processor if you’re into one of these titles.

On the other hand, we’re entirely graphics bound in Tomb Raider, and the same applies to a lesser extent in Far Cry with 4xAA and 8xAF enabled as well. Once we get the Prescott 3.4GHz processor up and running properly we’ll add it to this article as well, perhaps a 3GHz target is a little conservative for X800 PRO.

Again, as we said in the first article, hopefully you found this informative and helped you narrow down which hardware combination works best for your situation. We plan on providing similar reports for the X800 XT, as well as NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 line also. By the time we’re done, you should have an ideal clock speed nailed down for each class of graphics processor – that’s the plan at least.