Fill rates
Before we dive into the benchmarks, let's take a quick look at how the cards we'll be comparing today stack up in terms of their respective peak theoretical fill rates and memory bandwidth.

Core clock (MHz) Pixel pipelines Peak fill rate (Mpixels/s) Texture units per pixel pipeline Peak fill rate (Mtexels/s) Memory clock (MHz) Memory bus width (bits) Peak memory bandwidth (GB/s)
GeForce4 Ti 4200 8X 250 4 1000 2 2000 512 128 8.2
Radeon 9500 Pro 275 8 2200 1 2200 540 128 8.6
Radeon 9000 Pro 275 4 1100 1 1100 550 128 8.8
GeForce4 MX460 300 2 600 2 1200 550 128 8.8
GeForce4 Ti 4600

300

 4 1200 2 2400 650 128 10.4
Parhelia-512 220 4 880 4 3520 550 256 17.6
Radeon 9700 Pro 325 8 2600 1 2600 620 256 19.8

In a perfect world, each graphics card would realize their entire potential fill rate, but our world is far from perfect. Here's how the cards stack up in 3DMark03's synthetic fill rate tests.

ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro runs away with 3DMark03's single-texturing fill rate test followed the GeForce4 Ti 4600 and Radeon 9500 Pro virtually tied for a distant second. What's interesting to note here is that the Radeon 9700 Pro's fill rate actually climbs as the display resolution increases.

In 3DMark03's multi-texturing fill rate test, Matrox's Parhelia surges to the front of the pack, though its fill rate drops as the resolution increases. The Parhelia is closely followed by ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro and NVIDIA's GeForce 4 Ti 4600. This time, both the Radeon 9700 and 9500 Pro's fill rates increase as the display resolution increases.

How do 3DMark03's fill rate results compare to each cards' peak theoretical fill rates?

When it comes to single-texturing, generally not well. Though the Radeon 9700 Pro boasts the highest theoretical peak and measured single-texturing fill rate, the card's performance isn't anywhere near maximizing its theoretical capacity. As far as efficiency goes, the Radeon 9500 Pro turns in the worst performance of the lot, realizing less than 40% of its theoretical peak single-texturing fill rate.

Curiously, it's the less endowed graphics cards that get the most out of their peak theoretical fill rates. The GeForce4 MX 460 and Parhelia-512 make particularly effective use of their limited peak single-texturing fill rates, though their overall performance isn't particularly impressive.

When we look at multi-texturing fill rates, the overall efficiency of the cards improves significantly. Here, the Radeon 9000 Pro realizes almost all of its peak theoretical multi-texturing fill rate, which is quite impressive.