As you can see from the graph below, those settings pull the frame rate way down.Īt what I call 'sane' 3D game settings, it's hard to justify the cost of the Radeon 9800 Pro upgrade (or 9800 XT if ATI or Apple offers it to the aftermarket). Just for fun, we used ATI Displays utility to turn on Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (4X) and Anisotropic Filtering (4X). The numbers above are correct and the 4X AGP rating does NOT hobble this card in any application we tested except VertexPerformanceTest, an OpenGL developer test tool we used on the previous article.
I earlier reported that the 9800 Pro 'Retail Edition' was slower than the other two 9800s, but that was an error. Though Quake3 Arena is considered 'old news' by avid 3D gamers, I continue to test with it because of all the effort the programmers went through to optimize it for Velocity Engine, Dual Processors, and OpenGL Hardware.
