Synthetic tests
We'll kick off our review with a series of synthetic tests, so we can see how the Radeon 9800 Pro's enhancements have helped specific kinds of performance versus the 9700 Pro. We'll also use some more general application-based tests to gauge real-world performance, as well.

Fill rate
First and foremost in graphics performance, as always, is fill rate. We are talking raw, pixel-pushing power here, and in this case, specs matter. Specifications aren't destiny for a GPU, but they are a full-ride scholarship to the college of its choice plus free tutoring whenever needed. In this department, the 9800 is especially well-endowed. Behold, the trusty chip chart, sorted conveniently in order of memory bandwidth:

The 9800 Pro is the pimp-daddy of pixel-pushing prowess, with over 3 gigapixels per second of single-textured fill rate. With two-layer multitexturing in the picture, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra has a higher peak texel fill rate, but the FX may lack the memory bandwidth to keep up with the 9800 Pro. In the special case of four-layer multitexturing, Matrox's Parhelia leads the pack, but theory and reality rarely collide there.

Overall, the fill rate increase (and corresponding memory bandwidth increase) from the 9700 Pro to the 9800 Pro is fairly modest. However, since the 9800 Pro supplants the 9700 Pro at the same price point, the gains are quite welcome.

Here's how the 9800 Pro's measured up in our synthetic tests.

The 9800 Pro nicely distances itself from its older sibling, and it absolutely crushes the previous-gen NVIDIA card in single-textured fill rate. With multitexturing, the 9800 Pro is still quite potent.

Diss enjoys playing theoretical versus actual with fill rate, so we can see how memory bandwidth limitations and other mitigating factors keep the chips from reaching their peak potential. (Of course, with synthetic tests, those limitations don't always show up quite as much as they can in real applications.) I'll indulge him. Here's the dirt.

The 9800 Pro stays a ways below its theoretical peak pixel fill rate with single texturing, but when multiple textures are required, it's able to achieve near-perfection in the 3DMark fill rate test.

Before we go on, I should note that for a really high-end card like the 9800 Pro, the most important sorts of fill rate performance aren't the straight-up numbers we're measuring here. The 9800 Pro can deliver amazing performance with anisotropic filtering and edge antialiasing enabled, which is where a card like this really excels. We will look at antialiasing and texture filtering performance later in the review, but I wanted to mention that fact now. The R350 GPU employs sophisticated techniques like 6:1 color compression to make AA performance especially smooth. In fact, our entire test suite should probably be revised to better account for antialiasing and the like, but we didn't have time to make those revisions since the 9800 Pro arrived in our labs just this past Saturday.

Occlusion detection
VillageMark tests fill rate, including the ability of a GPU to avoid drawing pixels that won't make it onscreen—a.k.a. overdraw. These pixels are generally situated behind others in a scene and are therefore obscured. The R3x0 chips use a technique called Early Z to "virtually eliminate" overdraw. VillageMark renders a scene with gobs of overdraw, and it's up to the cards to cope.

The 9800 comes through looking good, although it doesn't appear to be wildly more efficient than the 9700 Pro. The GeForce4 Ti chip lacks Early Z, though it does have some overdraw-reduction abilities, and the disparity shows.