steakphish's Full Review: ATI RADEON® 9800 Pro, (128 MB) AGP Video Card
I managed to get my grubby little hands on ATI's second most powerful card on the market, the ATI Radeon 9800 PRO. Recently, ATI came out with a $500 Radeon XT card which offers slightly more performance for $200 more than the 9800 PRO, which is a ripoff. If you're looking for a high end card that will tear up benchmarks and framerates, this is THE card to get. However, it does face some stiff competition.
The competition in question is the Geforce FX 5900 ULTRA. The 9800 PRO and 5900 ULTRA are pretty much deadlocked in gaming performance. The 5900 ULTRA's strength is raw power. Anti-aliasing and super high resolutions are not a problem for either of these two cards, and the 5900 ULTRA actually does slightly better than the 9800 PRO is those reguards. However, once games started taking full advantage of the most recent DirectX 9 features, the 9800 PRO's true strenghs began to shine. Check out the Half Life 2 benchmarks to see what I'm talking about. At full precision quality for Half Life 2, the 5900 ULTRA slumps to a meager 30 FPS average while the 9800 PRO steams along at 60 FPS. If you are looking to play Half Life 2, the 9800 PRO is for you. Another advantage the 9800 PRO has over the 5900 ULTRA is that it's both reasonably sized (the 5900 ULTRA is gargantuan) and is a hell of a lot quieter as well.
THE CARD
The 9800 PRO sports 128MB of DDR memory which is certainly enough memory to crank the resolutions and textures of today's games. Also, the memory is 256 bit, which means it has memory bandwidth to spare. 6X AA? Sure. 16X AF? Not a problem. You can pretty much forget ever having to play a game at 800x600 or below. You'll be riding high on super clear images with a screaming fast framerate.
The 9800 PRO comes in with a 380 mhz core clock and 340 mhz memory clock (because it's DDR memory, that makes it an effective 680 mhz). This doesn't seem like much when you look at cards like the 5800, which gets dominated by the 9800 PRO, but has 400/800 mhz clock speeds. It's all in the design. The card does run a little hot and it raised by temperatures up a bit, but it was nothing my computer can't already handle. However, don't expect to be overclocking your 9800 PRO very much. The 9800 PRO, like all other DX 9 cards, supports the latest Pixel and Vertex shaders, and well as all of the other bells and wistles of Direct X 9.
INSTALLATION
I was switching to 9800 PRO from a very low-end Geforce 4 MX 440 and I was a little nervous about installing the new drivers, but alas, nothing went wrong. I uninstalled the 52.16 NVIDIA drivers, slapped in the 9800 PRO, booted up and installed the newest Catalyst drivers. I immediately started fidgeting around with the wealth of options I got in the display menu, and I encountered my first odd quirk. The 9800 PRO utilizes a program called SMARTGART which monitors your AGP bus, and my AGP bus defaulted to 1x. I was only able to crank it up to 4x even though my motherboard, an Asus A7N266-VM, is perfectly capable of handling 8X speeds. Another odd thing I noticed was that all of my Flash movies ranned a little choppy, which was odd since they worked fine with my MX 440. Max Payne also refused to work, but all of my other games ran fine with no problems.
THE SEXINESS
After delving into gaming bliss for a few hours I decided to take 3DMark 2001 SE for a spin and see how much of a boost I got. Here's my current setup:
ASUS A7N266-VM w/ 8X AGP (running at 4X)
Athlon XP 2400+ @ 2ghz.
256MB Crucial PC2100 RAM (DDR 266)
Radeon 9800 PRO
With my MX 440, running on default settings (1024x768x32, etc.), I managed a score of ~4200. With the 9800 PRO I'm riding along with a score of almost 13000. Sexy. I also get a very respectable score of 5,700 on 3DMark 2003.
All of my games run super sweet as you can imagine. I cranked up every possible thing in Max Payne 2, including 6X Anti Aliasing, and was still chugging along at 50+ FPS. Mighty nice. My low amount of memory (256 MB only because I bought two other sticks and neither of them worked, much to my dismay) does hurt the framerates and benchmarks, but the main gameplay is wicked fast. Even system hogs like Halo, C&C: Generals, and Deus Ex 2: Invisible War are no match for the 9800 PRO, and that even surprised me.
CONCLUSION
The 9800 won't be fading into obscurity any time soon. It's an amazing card that will stay competetive for quite a while yet. Since the release of the 9800 XT, the 9800 PRO has dropped to $300, so you'd be wise to get it now, especially since you have people who not too long ago had to pay the full $400 for it. While it is slighty, very slightly, less powerful than the 5900 ULTRA or 5950 ULTRA, it smokes the competition when you throw the latest visual enhancements at them, and that's downright sweet. And as always, playing Half Life 2 and Doom 3 (when they finally come out) and silky smooth framerates is always a plus. If you're a hardcore gamer, you owe it to yourself to get this card.
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