Beating back a challenge from Nvidia's GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, ATI's Radeon 9800 Pro shines in ZDNet Labs' tests.

ATI is out to defend its title as current 3D-graphics performance champ. On the heels of last year's successful Radeon 9700 Pro, ATI released the Radeon 9800 series. The first product in this series, the US$400 Radeon 9800 Pro with 128MB of DDR memory is designed for hard-core gamers and competes head to head with the recently released Nvidia GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. Does the Radeon 9800 pull ahead? To find out, ZDNet Labs has tested final versions of both cards using the most up-to-date beta drivers. (Performance of both should improve as the companies finalise their drivers.)

Overall, our tests declare the Radeon 9800 the clear winner. Our exact results varied, however, depending on which gaming benchmarks we used and whether we tested with advanced features turned on--specifically, antialiasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF). (AA makes the jagged edges on diagonal lines appear smoother by blending the colours into the background. AF makes the textures on slanted 3D surfaces look much sharper and maintains proper perspective, enhancing the visual quality of items such as long, straight corridors in first-person shooters.) Overall, these effects greatly enhance the visual quality of games, but in the process, they also put heavy stress on graphics cards, which is why they make a significant impact in performance testing.

With AA and AF enabled at the same high resolution, the Radeon 9800 significantly outperformed the GeForce FX. For instance, with 4X AA and 4X AF, the Radeon 9800 performed 22 percent faster on 3DMark03 and 45 percent faster on Unreal Tournament tests. At lower resolutions (1,024x768), the performance difference wasn't as great--we even saw a few instances where the 5800 performed slightly better. But it's clear that the Radeon 9800 was much better equipped to handle tougher tasks. When we enabled 4X AA and 4X AF at 1,600x1,200 on Unreal Tournament, the Radeon 9800's performance decreased by 42 percent, while the GeForce FX sustained a 63 percent performance hit. In other words, the Radeon 9800 really proved its mettle at high resolutions with advanced feature sets enabled.

Without these advanced features, the Radeon 9800 Pro and the GeForce FX ran pretty much neck and neck. The Radeon 9800 came in a hair faster on Futuremark's 3DMark03 (1,600x1,200), while the GeForce FX had the upper hand on the Flyby-Antalus scene in Unreal Tournament 2003 (also at 1,600x1,200).

The Radeon 9800 Pro we tested runs at 380MHz and has 128MB of DDR (340MHz) memory. On paper, those specs pale in comparison to those of the GeForce FX, which has both an engine clock speed and a memory speed of 500MHz. But these numbers don't tell the whole story since the Radeon 9800 is designed to take everything the GPU and the memory can throw at it. Specifically, it has a 256-bit memory interface, whereas the GeForce FX has only a 128-bit memory interface. Like the GeForce FX, the Radeon 9800 has all the standard connectors, including VGA, DVI output for digital flat panels, and S-Video out.

Later this year, ATI plans to introduce a 256MB version of the Radeon 9800. In April, the company also plans to release Radeon 9600- and 9200-series products. The Radeon 9600 Pro will actually have a slightly faster engine clock speed than the 9800--400MHz vs. 380MHz--but halves the number of rendering pipes and the width of the memory interface, so its performance will take a hit.

ATI Radeon 9800
Company: ATI Technologies
Price: $US$400 (~AU$660)
Distributor: Selected resellers

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