Radeon 9000 Pro Anti-aliasing and Anisotropic Performance

Although ATI has moved to a more sophisticated multisampling-based SMOOTHVISION 2.0 format for the Radeon 9700 Pro, the Radeon 9000 Pro still uses the original SMOOTHVISION 1.0 and is basically a supersampling implementation. This brings up some performance concerns, and when coupled with the 64-MB of card memory, really limits our testing to AA 2X settings. We have also tested anisotropic filtering, along with both AA and AF modes enabled together.

The Radeon 9000 Pro's anisotropic filtering results are quite good and even at 8X, the Return to Castle Wolfenstein HQ results drop only marginally. Once we load up even 2X Quality anti-aliasing though, the Radeon 9000 Pro falters and starts dropping frames quite noticeably. Anything higher than 2X takes a huge performance toll and the board's 64-MB of memory limits 4X AA to only 1024x768. The last test shows some good news, as even though 2X AA does lower framerates, adding anisotropic filtering to the mix doesn't drop the framerate that much. .

Radeon 9000 Pro Overclocking

As in all of our 3D video card reviews, we took the Radeon 9000 Pro to the overclocking rack to see what speeds we could attain. The Hynix 3.3 ns memory had us excited, but in the end, 311 MHz was the highest level we could run stable. The Radeon 9000 Pro core was much the same story, and we were able to hit 302 MHz with no problems. Any higher than 302/311 MHz and we started to see image anomalies and tearing after long-term benchmarking or standard gaming use.

In order to show the performance increase for this sort of overclock, we ran Return to Castle Wolfenstein in HQ mode and compared it not only to the original Radeon 9000 Pro scores, but to the GeForce3 Ti and GeForce4 Ti cards as well. The following chart has all the data, and when overclocked, the Radeon 9700 Pro is faster in this game than even a GeForce4 Ti 4200. Of course, the other NVIDIA cards could also be overclocked in a true face-off, and these results are only intended to show the relative performance gains of overclocking a Radeon 9000 Pro.

The next chart shows a percentage break-down of the actual percentage jumps that the Radeon 9000 Pro experienced when overclocked. These are also separated by resolution, and show the Radeon 900 Pro at 302/311 MHz gaining nicely up to 1280x1024, and then falling back slightly at 1600x1200.

* Keep in mind that these overclocking results are only indicative of a single ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 64-MB card, so your overclocking mileage may definitely vary.