Review: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB

Like the 9600 Pro review, let's start with the baseline graph first and see what all the new clock and framebuffer does.

400 points increase over the 128MB version, all down to the extra clock speeds. 3DMark at 1024x768 doesn't come close to needing more than 128MB of memory to store textures or framebuffer output since there's no IQ settings enabled.

What about when we turn those on?

The board maintains its 400 point advantage over the 128MB model whereas the 9700 Pro drops nearly 1000 points behind the 128MB 9800 Pro despite only being ~400 points slower with no IQ features on. We're maybe starting to eat in to the bigger framebuffer here when the card is able to keep performance even when IQ features are enabled. While some of that performance advantage is down to architectural advantages that R350 has over R300, it's maybe not entirely the reason why. We'll hopefully see confirm that in the performance drop graph.

Lastly, before we look at that graph, the 1600x1200 with IQ graph.

The 9700 Pro saves some face here, while the two 9800 Pro's bunch up a lot closer than we've seen before. We noticed something similar to this in the 9600 Pro article. Here's the PD graph.

So while the graphs can look somewhat skewed at first glance, the PD graph shows us what's really going on. Both R350's exhibit identical performance drops at each setting, meaning the 256MB framebuffer isn't really eating into things. It's when the PD graph starts to look different between the R350 boards that you'll see where the 256MB of memory comes in handy.

Let's try another test.