Gigabyte's Radeon 9700 Pro - Hitting 400MHz

Unreal Tournament 2003 Performance

We drastically reduced the number of benchmarks for this review, simply to keep things manageable while still getting our point across about the performance improvements to be had by overclocking the R300.

Unreal Tournament 2003 dm-Antalus 1024x768x32 Gigabyte GV-R9700Pro (400/674) ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (378/674) Gigabyte GV-R9700Pro ATI Radeon 9700 Pro NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 147.8 147.4 146.5 142.5 104.7 | 0 | 30 | 59 | 89 | 118 | 148 | 18

Unreal Tournament 2003 dm-Antalus 1600x1200x32 ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (378/674) Gigabyte GV-R9700Pro (400/674) ATI Radeon 9700 Pro Gigabyte GV-R9700Pro NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 86.1 79.1 77.7 69.6 45.1 | 0 | 17 | 34 | 52 | 69 | 86 | 103

Although at 1024x768 the GV-R9700Pro is slightly faster than ATI's solution, at higher resolutions it clearly falls behind. Overclocking the GV-R9700Pro yields a 14% performance gain at 1600x1200, but the ATI card is still able to outperform it. Once the GV-R9700Pro reaches final production, the performance should improve to the point where it can equal the ATI solution.

Unreal Tournament 2003 dm-Asbestos 1600x1200x32 Gigabyte GV-R9700Pro (400/674) ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (378/674) Gigabyte GV-R9700Pro ATI Radeon 9700 Pro NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 146 143.7 128.5 128.4 92.3 | 0 | 29 | 58 | 88 | 117 | 146 | 175

In more CPU bound tests such as Asbestos, the performance difference between the Gigabyte and ATI cards is much less pronounced, which is the way things should be once the GV-R9700Pro reaches maturity.