Our goal was to find out in what areas the 9800 Pro shows us any hardware improvements compared to the 9700 Pro at the same clock speeds.
In games such as Unreal Tournament 2003, Serious Sam 2, and Splinter Cell there was up to a 10% improvement in performance with NoAA/NoAF, but honestly, NoAA/NoAF modes are not being used by folks paying over US$300 for a video card now days. We saw an even smaller performance increase for the 9800 Pro with AA enabled. 4XAA seems to be the real sweet spot for performance improvements with the 9800 Pro compared to the 9700 Pro. When it comes to Anisotropic Filtering (AF) we didn?t see any tangible improvements in performance. It?s a shame too since we know that Anisotropic with Trilinear filtering does cause a sizable performance hit on the 9700/9800 Pro. That is not to say ATI is doing a bad job with AF as they have single-handedly brought usable AF to the masses. With AA and AF combined we really didn?t see any noticeable improvements in performance in our gaming data with the cards at the same clock speeds. The enhanced memory controller is supposed to give us faster AA at higher resolutions, but we just didn?t see that with any real impact. The overall AA FPS increase looked to be 1% to 5% at best.
However it does look like Pixel Shader performance is enhanced on the 9800 Pro by a sizeable amount. 3DMark03 shader benches did show us a some improvement. This was further confirmed with ShaderMark which showed us some dramatic gains in Pixel Shader 2.0. A bit of this was seen in the Code Creatures, using DX8 shaders, as well. We can hope this will come in handy with more games as they implement more advanced pixel shader technology.
We have certainly found the 9800 Pro VPU to be quite scalable. We are able to get this card well over 400MHz core clock while stable. In fact, it was running quite well all day at 430MHz core without artifacts. This of course puts the 9800 Pro clock over that of the GeForceFX 5800, and the memory bandwidth is already greater than the GFFX by a long shot.
Everything combined though really shows us that the improvements of the 9800 Pro over the 9700 Pro came mostly from the increased core and memory clock speeds in our 9800 Pro review. The games available for sale right now just cannot show us how shader performance or anything else might have been improved. The ATI F-Buffer feature is not spotlighted in our tests either. It is a feature that will be unused until a game comes out that uses long shader instructions and is seen correctly implemented by game developers.
While the 9800 series VPU touts many advancements, the biggest addition to the line up is the stronger clock speeds of the card when using it to play the latest and greatest video games of today. Our synthetic pixel shader testing would seem to suggest that the ATI 9800 VPU is also aimed at catering to games that are not yet even on the market. This of course might ease anyone's mind that is looking for a video card solution that is "future proof".
One thing is for sure, ATI's new 9800 series VPU will deliver the most frames per second while also providing image quality that is second to none.
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