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Chameleonmark

Yes, we are committing the blasphemy of using an nVidia Benchmark for ATI graphics cards. But these chameleons are just incredibly cool predators.

Glass

RADEON 9800: blue-green; 9700: orange pink

Real

Shiny

Conclusion

The main conclusion is a very down to earth statement that there were no surprises. In almost all benchmarks, the RADEON 9800 was approximately 13% faster than the RADEON 9700, and the overall level of performance is such that it would be a crime to play any game at less than 1280 x 1024 x 32 at the highest level of AA and AF.

For online gaming, the situation, of course changes somewhat since resolution eats bandwidth but again, the excellent AA and AF quality will, in most cases, compensate for the lower granularity. At this point, we cannot compare the numbers to the latest offerings from the nVidia camp, rest assured, though, such comparison will come in the near future.

One thing about this review has been that we did not use real life gaming benchmarks and the reason is simple enough: There are no current games that would stress the feature set and performance of these high-end cards beyond generating absurd frame rates. Therefore, the synthetic benchmarks are sythetic but at the same time more forward looking and reflect the challenges of the next generation of game, without which, there would be no need for any of the new cards anyway.

So, all we need now are the games that take advantage of the new features and performance.

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