Due to the Radeon 9700 Pro being a totally new video card and one with a powerful design and architecture, we're going to be taking a closer look at some of the detailed 3DMark 2001SE tests to see exactly where ATI starts and the competition ends.
The first area we'll be examining are the various Game 1, 2 and 3 High Detail framerate tests. As you can see by the following charts, both Game 1 and 3 don't really show a huge framerate increase using the Radeon 9700 Pro, but Game 2 is a totally different story. Here, the Radeon 9700 Pro powers ahead of the GeForce4 Ti cards and posts scores 33% to 60%+ higher than the GeForce4Ti line.
Next, let's check out the very demanding Nature test, which has been enhanced for 3DMark 2001SE and really shows off the performance potential in a DirectX 8.X game. In this area, the Radeon 9700 Pro takes no prisoners and more than doubles the score of a GeForce4 Ti 4600.
The last area of detailed testing concerns the performance of the pixel and vertex shaders. The three performance charts that follow leave no doubt whether the Radeon 9700 Pro has lived up to advanced billing. This kind of lead in such an important area is virtually unprecedented, as even a GeForce4 Ti 4200 is able to stay quite close to its faster Ti 4600 cousin.
