ATI Radeon 9700 Pro - Delivering as Promised

AA & Anisotropic Filtering Performance - Unreal Tournament 2003

What good is the Radeon 9700 Pro if it only excels at 1600x1200? For those of you with monitors that aren't capable of going that high, the Radeon 9700 Pro provides a different option. Instead of increasing the resolution, keep it set at 1024x768 but crank up some of the features. If you're spending $399 on a video card you should be able to run at 4X AA with 16X anisotropic filtering enabled, but will the Radeon 9700 Pro allow it and still attain reasonable frame rates?

We ran a subset of our benchmarks with the following settings for the Radeon 9700 Pro:

Unreal Tournament 2003 w/ AA & Aniso dm-antalus @ 1600x1200 ATI Radeon 9700 Pro NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 31.3 11.1 | 0 | 6 | 13 | 19 | 25 | 31 | 38

While not as playable at the higher resolutions, at 1024x768 with AA & anisotropic filtering cranked up, the Radeon 9700 Pro is definitely playable - even in this very stressful benchmark.

Unreal Tournament 2003 w/ AA & Aniso dm-asbestos @ 1600x1200 ATI Radeon 9700 Pro NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 52.4 25.0 | 0 | 10 | 21 | 31 | 42 | 52 | 63

You'll remember dm-asbestos as the benchmark that the Ti 4600 came close to the Radeon 9700 Pro in, but not anymore. When AA and anisotropic filtering are enabled, the Ti 4600 falls behind considerably.

Unreal Tournament 2003 w/ AA & Aniso dm-inferno @ 1600x1200 ATI Radeon 9700 Pro NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 29.8 10.5 | 0 | 6 | 12 | 18 | 24 | 30 | 36

The trend continues with our final UT2003 test.