Performance Hits
This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.
Much like I did in the Radeon 9000 Pro review, I have measured how much of a performance hit the Radeon 9700 Pro and GeForce4 Ti4600 cards take when you enable anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, and when you turn up the resolution.Anti-Aliasing Performance Hit
This one is absolutely nuts– even with 4xAA enabled, the ATI 9700 still doesn’t even lose half of its base framerate! The Ti4600 loses anywhere from 65% to 70% of its performance in comparison. The Radeon 9700 is capable of 6xAA (which looks amazing BTW) but I didn’t benchmark it since there’s really nothing to compare it to. You can get almost-free 2xAA with the Radeon 9700 Pro– it’s a far cry from “free 4xAA” as some rumors of the NV30 have claimed, but this is no rumor!
Anisotropic Filtering Performance Hit
Again, the Radeon 9700 wins– though, ATI cards have historically had the lead in anisotropic performance and how much of a performance hit it takes.
Resolution-Change Performance Hit
While the Radeon does manage a win here, it isn’t by nearly as much as the two previous tests. I think it’s safe to say that the Radeon 9700 likes eye candy enabled, how about you? 😉 Now that the benchmarks are finished…