Sapphire Radeon 9800XT reviewed

SOMEWHAT UNSPOOKILY, the first firm to retail with a Radeon 9800XT is Sapphire, the card maker that produces all - or at least most - of these cards for ATi.

The brand was created by two people - Dasha Forster (the one that sells) and Brian Skelton (the one that messes with the press) - both veterans of computer graphics, as Dasha used to work for ATI and Brian used to work for 3DFX and later for Power 3D - an Nvidia partner that simply could not deliver what it was preaching, a water-cooled Geforce 3.

Things have gotten complicated for ATI partners since Asus just jumped in to rock the gondola but we believe things will become even more complicated in the future. More will tie up with both Nvidia and ATI, though this can't be a bad thing for the consumer.

Still, that's something of an irrelevance to Sapphire, at least for now, since they will get a nickel from each and every card anyone sells since they made them all, even if they are blue. In the last week of October a first Sapphiric samples emerged and the first shops got a sprinkling of Radeon 9800XT in stock and we had the opportunity to play with one of those.

The Radeon 9800XT is what ATI wants to position against Geforce FX 5950 Ultra, which is clocked at 475 core and 950 MHz memory. ATi's card runs at an unusual 412 MHz - to fit into Dell's heat recommendation gloves, we learned - while its memory rocks at 730 MHz. This time ATI used DDR 1 since it does not get as warm as its younger brother DDR II - the one that didn't have much luck in graphics so far.

The Radeon 9800 PRO 256 MB DDR II version was clocked at 380 MHz core and 700 MHz memory so we cannot consider that Radeon 9800 XT a huge step forward with just 32MHz faster core and 30MHz faster memory. In Nvidia's case, the Geforce FX 5950 Ultra is 25 MHz faster while the memory hums along at 50 MHz faster, which shows that there's not much space for huge performance and clock jumps this time around. It is simply time to relax and get what you can until NV40 and R420 tip up.

This Radeon needs Catalyst 3.8 drivers, which offer some very nice options and settings and we were happy with them. We had no problems in all benchmarks and games we tried out on the card. This driver has Overdrive option that will run the card at 418.5 MHz almost in all conditions - just six and a half MHz faster than ATi's clock.

One difference from Gainward's Cool FX is that you just take this card out of the box and plug it into the case with no need to mess with anything, simply plug in, install drivers and play.

Sapphire cards have a really eye-catching cooler that all of these Radeons apart from Asus', of course, will use. Asus likes to be different.

Apart from the sticker that says "Sapphire" on the cooler, the retail card is identical to ATI's reference design, which we reckon was built by Sapphire anyhow.

You get all the cables that you need including DVI, S-Video and composite outs - necessary for plugging your machine into the telly. Of course, there's a Half Live 2 voucher in the box, so expect to download or to mail order a copy of that particular pot pourri at some uncharted point in the coming weeks or months.

The new test rig
Pentium P4 at 2.8GHz FSB 800
Albatron i865PR board
2 x 256MB Corsair PC4000 XMS
Western Digital 80GB 8MB cache drive
Pioneer Slot IN DVD
Targa Visionary 19 inch Display

We put this card up against Gainward's CoolFX Geforce FX 5950 Ultra clocked at Nvidia's reference speed of 475 MHz core and 950 MHz memory and we tested "old" PowerColor's Radeon 9800PRO 256 MB DDR II clocked at 378MHz core with 702MHz memory. We didn't include Gainward Cool FX results simply since because of huge price gap between this ATI card and Gainward's offering. Reference Nvidia Geforce FX 5950 Ultra costs approximately the same as the Radeon 9800XT so that's why we benchmarked them together.

The new Halo and Max Payne 2 where used and I plan to use them in future. In Nvidia's case these tests we ran Leadtek's 5900 TDH 350 non-ultra, clocked at 400 MHz / 800 MHz since Gainward card had to be returned and I simply didn't had any other Nvidia cards in my hands. We hope to see something more of the Geforce FX 5950 Ultra soon and to run this test on them as well.

Halo is DirectX 9 game and we tested with PS 2.0 shader settings see how this game acts with this heavy shaders in use.

The Max Payne 2 test I used was developed by me for the INQUIRER with the help of Markus Maki from Remedy who gave us a few useful guidelines. We simply used very popular Fraps and played one of the first cut scenes in the game - when the elevator goes down and nasty terrorist shoots your boss, followed by big gas explosion and heavy motion blur usage in a slow motion part of the scene. This is part of first scene that takes place in hospital just when you awake.

Results
The results were various and you cannot easily say that either Radeon 9800XT or Geforce FX 5950 Ultra wins in all test situations.

In Quake 3, the Geforce FX 5950 Ultra clearly takes a lead of 10 to 20 FPS with no effects used, while at 1280 FSAA 4X, Nvidia leads by almost 80 FPS while at 1600x1200 Nvidia leads by 45 FPS - and that's not a little. In FSAA 4X with Anisotropic filtering, Nvidia still leads by 10 FPS at 1024x768 to 30 FPS at 1600x1200. Nvidia clearly has Quake 3 sewn up.

The situation dramatically changes to ATI's advantage in 3dmark2001SE build 330, where ATI has almost a 33 FPS lead over Nvidia. Sapphire's Radeon 9800XT ends up 1100 marks faster then Nvidia's last offering. This shows a huge performance advantage in complex DirectX 8 test. Even the old Radeon 9800PRO outscores Nvidia. Sapphire's Radeon 9800XT is marginally faster than ATI's older offering.

3Dmark03 shows a slight advantage for the XT, with over 5950 in overall score while in most of games ATI and Nvidia's last offering are neck to neck, with no clear winner. In single texturing, ATI 8 pipeline wins out over Nvidia's 4 and ATI manages to get 350 M Texel better score while Nvidia clearly wins in Multitexture by more then 440 Mega Texels, since in 4x2 Nvidia renders faster ATI's 8x1. A veritable clash of marchitectural titans.

Unreal Tournament is a rough fight, since Nvidia and ATI are very close to each other while in Fly mode Nvidia can be one to three frames faster while ATI wins at 1024x768 by not ovely impressive 3 FPS. In Bot mode ATI ends up 0.4 to 1 FPS faster. Let's call it even.

Serious Sam 2 with 4Y FSAA and 8X Anisotroping gives Geforce FX 5950 Ultra a slight advantage over Radeon 9800XT but we are still only talking about few FPS. In Aquamark, Sapphire's Radeon 9800XT is faster but by less than a half frame. A tight battle one more time.

Please bear in mind that with Halo and Max Payne 2 we used only Geforce FX 5900 non Ultra clocked at 400 MHz core and 800 MHz memory.

In Halo with Pixel shader 2.0 settings and beautiful graphics Geforce FX 5900 non Ultra wins by 4 FPS in 1024x768 while Sapphire Radeon 9800XT wins by up to 5 FPS over this Nvidia offering. This indicates that the 75 MHz faster-clocked Nvidia card could easily win this test or be really tight with ATI. We hope to update you soon on this.

But Max Payne 2 is bit different. The scene that I used has slow motion followed with motion blur, lot of smoke and explosions and lot of bullets in bullet time camera mode. You can easily say it's very much what you will expect in game, although some scenes are even more complex of course.

Well, the Sapphire Radeon 9800XT has huge performance advantage over Geforce FX 5900 and I believe that not even a 5950 Ultra would perform much better. Sapphire ends up 30 percent faster in 10x7, an incredible 250 percent, or two and a half times faster in 12x10 and two times 100 percent faster in 1600x1200.

Remedy told us that Nvidia experiences a huge performance impact when motion blur is used and we hope that this could be resolved by a new Nvidia driver - in an honest way. It's very important to note that neither Nvidia nor ATI's drivers were optimised at all for any of the cards, so this is how these cards perform without good or bad tweaks. This one went in ATI favour.

Conclusion
The times where one of the competitors is sky higher than another are gone at - least until the next-generation R420 and NV40 are born in spring.

At 585 Euros - the price here around the corner in a Viennese shop - the 9800XT will be the fastest of all ATI cards and, in some cases, the fastest card of all. True, some older games such as Serious Sam 2 or Quake 3 are in Nvidia's favour while Max Payne is clearly ATI's game. In synthetic test, ATI wins, showing that under the hood ATI have really efficient shaders, Still, then again in Unreal Tournament, Halo and Aquamark 3 Sapphire Radeon 9800XT ends up little bit faster or some times slower but still very close to Geforce FX 5950 Ultra.

The big plus for Sapphire's Radeon 9800XT is that at the same price you will get Half Life 2 so if you want to buy this game. this card should seriously be considered as your next one.

As for an upgrade if you have Radeon 9700 PRO or slower or Nvidia FX 5800 or TI 4600 / Ti 4800 this is the right time to upgrade to 9800XT, if you have the cash to hand of course. There is no sense in upgrading your Radeon 9800 PRO with 128 MB Ram, or the little bit memory-wise faster 9800PRO with 256 DDR II.

This card is quiet which is what we like and we can recommend it to anyone that can afford it. µ