HIS All-In-Wonder 9600 XT

Unreal Tournament 2004

Unreal Tournament 2004 has a fairly linear performance increase in relation to clock speed; the 9600 PRO shows that fill-rate (which is a combination of core speed and the number of pixel pipelines) is important in this title. Having said that, the extra 125MHz core speed on the AIW 9600 XT results in a mere four frames per second increase at the test resolution and detail settings. When we tested higher resolutions and light Anti-Aliasing/Anisotropic Filtering, the frame drop was sufficient for the game to become unplayable. This proved that the lack of memory bandwidth and/or lack of memory footprint on the 9600 series have a great effect on performance. Seeing as the boards are in a mainstream price range, you cannot expect to have a full feature set and fantastic game performance with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering enabled.

Call Of Duty v1.4

Call Of Duty is very similar to Unreal Tournament in the way that at high resolution, the 9600 series ultimately struggles. The boards' lack memory bandwidth, which proves to be a very important part of any graphics architecture, severely limits the texture fill-rate that the core can theoretically achieve. When Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering are enabled, the lack of memory bandwidth becomes even more apparent. The difference between the three boards is fairly small, with the AIW 9600 XT only marginally faster than the standard 9600 XT. The 9600 PRO falls further back and is around four frames per second slower than the All-In-Wonder.