ATI’s Radeon 9700 (R300) – Crowning the New King

Quake III Arena

We had to include Quake III Arena for completeness, even though the Ti 4600 already gets ungodly frame rates under the benchmark.

Quake III Arena 'demo four' 1024x1768x32 Normalized to GeForce4 Ti 4600 ATI Radeon 9700 (128MB) GeForce4 Ti 4600 (128MB) Matrox Parhelia (128MB) 1.04 1.00 0.57 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1

At 1024x768 the benchmark is mostly CPU bound and thus we only see a 4% performance advantage, but once we crank up the resolution...

Quake III Arena 'demo four' 1280x1024x32 Normalized to GeForce4 Ti 4600 ATI Radeon 9700 (128MB) GeForce4 Ti 4600 (128MB) Matrox Parhelia (128MB) 1.23 1.00 0.50 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1

...4% turns into 23% and there's still some juice left.

Quake III Arena 'demo four' 1600x1200x32 Normalized to GeForce4 Ti 4600 ATI Radeon 9700 (128MB) GeForce4 Ti 4600 (128MB) Matrox Parhelia (128MB) 1.37 1.00 0.48 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0

Just when you thought that Quake III Arena couldn't get any faster, the Radeon 9700 manages to outperform the Ti 4600 at 1600x1200 by 37%.