Review: ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB

The benchmarking for this test initially was all over the place however, it was down to not disabling sound (which accounts for a large boost on Q3 since it completely disconnects its audio processing engine if it can't access sound hardware). So turning off sound made the 256MB board perform like it should, let's see how it did in the baseline graph.

Nothing interesting to see here, unless a 3fps difference makes you all giddy. We'll add some IQ to the mix now.

That's more like it, 9700 Pro gets made to work and performance drops off a little compared to the R350's. What about when we give it nearly 2.5x the pixels to process, never mind with IQ enabled.

No difference in the R350's at this setting and another drop for 9700 Pro. The PD graph will show the groovy details.

256MB R350 does the better of the three boards when IQ is initially enabled, however it's marginal at best and essentially it's identical across the board.

No magic usage of the extra memory and consistent performance from all 3 our on our favourite DX6 class benchmark. It's all about the clocks here.

We better try again with something different.