All cards were set for the best performance within their respective control panels with the vertical SYNC disabled always. The AGP bus was set at 4X for all tests as well due to the inability of any of the other cards to even achieve an 8X AGP environment. I tested the cards at resolutions of up to 1280X1024 using up to 4X AA since once again the other cards used cannot achieve anything higher. The RADEON 9700 is capable of rendering images with up to 16X antisotropic filtering and 6X Antialiasing for extremely crisp imaging and text.
This was a tedious multi-day project that included over twenty-six hours of just testing the various cards for the review not to mention the actual writing time involved. In the tests arena you can see the RADEON 9700 pulling ahead in every test we ran and in most cases by a very large margin. Another thing to take into consideration is the fact that the Nvidia drivers are much more mature than that of the RADEON drivers which are still very new for his card. With the release of more refined drivers the RADEON 9700 has the potential to be an even more robust and effective solution.
Actually the really most impressive feature of the RADEON 9700 is its ability to keep pumping out the pixels without losing much steam when the card is ran at ultra high resolutions even with the AA turned up to 4X. It also seems that the card is more performance savvy in Direct 3D than Open GL at the moment as seen in 3Dmark 2001 SE. With this test you can see the RADEON 9700 achieving scores that far surpass its Nvidia rivals top card the GF4 Ti4600. In tests like Quake III and Dronez we see the card barely beating the Ti series cards. Do not get me wrong the RADEON beat everyone in every test it is just that the marginal difference is not jaw dropping in the Open GL arena.
