PowerColor Radeon 9800 XT 256MB

Reviews: Hardware

Motherboards | Power Supplies | Memory | Systems | Video Cards

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Brian Kristensen
Kurtis
PowerColor
Feb. 9, 2004

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VPU Recover

VPU Recover is a rather nifty and extremely helpful feature, especially for those who overclock. In case of a system crash due to an unstable graphics card, VPU Recover will reset the card and in most cases save you from rebooting your computer. If VPU Recover cannot reset the card, it will switch to software rendering mode to allow you to save your work before restarting the computer. In the case of overclocking, if you push the card too far and cause the system to crash, VPU Recover would reset the card and you would be able to go back and set the last stable clock speeds without having to restart the entire computer.

Shader Effects

A new feature in Catalyst 3.9 is the SmartShader effect. The SmartShader applies unique pixel shader effects to OpenGL and Direct 3D games. Currently you can choose between the following effects: Normal (no effects), Black and White, Inverse, Classic, Porthole, RGB Cycle, and Stylize. Although the effects would be entertaining for a while, I don't see a real reason for using the effects and consider them more of a gimmick than a great feature.

Redefined Tabs

In Catalyst 3.7 and older drivers, there were two separate tabs for managing OpenGL and Direct 3D display properties. In 3.9 ATI has combined the two tabs into a single "3D" tab. This tab allows you to modify the advanced display settings such as Anti-Aliasing, Anisotropic Filtering, V-Sync and more. They also added a few predefined settings which will adjust automatically based on Performance or Quality. There is also the ability to create profiles containing different settings. This would be useful if you would like an easy way to customize the graphics settings for individual games.

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Page 4 of 17

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: What's Included & The Card
Page 3: Catalyst 3.9 Drivers Part 1
Page 4: Catalyst 3.9 Drivers Part 2
Page 5: Catalyst 4.1 Drivers
Page 6: Test Setup / Benchmarking
Page 7: Halo
Page 8: Unreal Tournament 2003
Page 9: Elite Force 2
Page 10: Splinter Cell
Page 11: Need for Speed: Underground
Page 12: Call of Duty
Page 13: Final Fantasy XI Vana'diel Bench2
Page 14: AquaMark3
Page 15: GunMetal
Page 16: Image Quality
Page 17: Overclocking / Conclusion

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6 User Comments

1 - Posted by jasonwatkins on January 4, 2004 - 5:39 am

Just curious, in the review you didn't state why you used old ATI drivers that are 2 revisions outdated. The current version 3.10's have been out for 2 weeks, but you used version 3.8 (3 months old). Therefore your PQ comparison to nVidia might not be valid since you used the latest nVidia drivers (dated 12/9) against old ATI drivers dated 10/8.

Jason

2 - Posted by A Person on January 4, 2004 - 2:39 pm

3.8 is older than 3.10?

3 - Posted by jasonwatkins on January 4, 2004 - 3:03 pm

Yes, ATI has been releasing drivers in this order: 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 (3.ten). The 3.10's are the tenth release in the 3 series.

Jason

4 - Posted by DnD on January 4, 2004 - 3:15 pm

Hey I think I just found what you can get me for my birthday :D

5 - Posted by Kurtis on January 4, 2004 - 3:40 pm

EDIT:

Just figured out what the prob was... We used the 3.9 drivers, and it was a typo in the review. So, in fact, we did not use 3.8, we used 3.9. Sorry for the confusion, review is being updated right now.

Also, the 3.10 drivers came out on 12/17, and that was after we had started testing.

We will also update the review again as soon as we can get a 5950 Ultra. At that time I will probably retest all the cards, or maybe just the 9800xt and the fx5950 ultra, we'll see.

6 - Posted by A Person on January 5, 2004 - 12:23 am

Ahh, that makes sense.

I cant wait to see the 9800pro and the 5950ultra head to head. Most people just review one or the other, this is gonna be interesting.

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