11. 3D Performance

Direct 3D Performance: 3DMark 2001 SE

The 3DMark 2001 SE scores bear witness to the high performance of the Mobility Radeon 9600. Despite a relatively slow CPU (real clock speed 1.86 GHz), it returns very solid results. Running 4x FSAA (Full Scene Anti-Aliasing) at UXGA resolution or even a combination of 4x FSAA and 8x anisotropic filtering quickly brings the machine, equipped with only 64 MB of graphics RAM, to its limits - the driver chooses to ignore some of the settings. The chip showed no such behavior at XGA and SXGA.

The frame rates of 3DMark's Game Lobby/ High Detail test prove that playing at resolutions higher than XGA is possible with this chip, even when using the highest quality settings. Quite amazingly, these scores are still a good deal higher than those of current integrated graphics solutions at standard settings without FSAA (!), for example, Intel's 855GM chipsets !