 | | Benchmarking With Comanche4 and Serious Sam SE | | A Little Bit DirectX and a Little Bit OpenGL... | |
Comanche 4:
Comanche4 is one of the most popular DirectX benchmarking applications on the web today. The utility does an excellent job of stressing the most powerful video cards available, making it work for every FPS it puts out. So let's get to it and see how the Ti4600 from eVGA held up in this round of torture.
Initially one might think the Ti4600 had difficulty beating the Ti500, inching past it by a meager 2.83 frames-per-second. However what we are seeing is the limitation of the CPU rather than a fault of the card. Once we start increasing the resolution, it's a safe bet that the comparison cards will not be able to sustain the same rate as the more powerful GeForce4.
At 1280x1024x32 we begin to see the comparison cards lose a bit more ground than the eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti4600. Let's see how things change at 1600x1200x32...
Notice how the other two cards take a nose dive while the eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti4600 lost less than 2 FPS from beginning to end. Clearly the Ti4600 video card is the superior graphic card. But hey, DirectX is only half of the story. Next we'll fire up some OpenGL benchmarks and see how the three cards handle the pressure.
Serious Sam SE:
Our first test is one of the few benchmark utilities that can test both DirectX and OpenGL, Serious Sam SE. Serious Sam SE is also one of the few utilities that can actually detect which video card is installed and adjust the settings for optimal performance. Although we feel this is great for game play, as a benchmark this can make for lopsided scores since the program plays to the strengths of the video card that is installed. To help even the playing field, we've opted to use a series of scripts that Anthony "Reverend" Tan has put together that helps to level the playing field between the various cards. In our tests we ran the script for "Max Quality" settings, with no anisotropic filtering enabled and set the resolution and color depth accordingly.
To show how well the utility stresses a card, note how in the first test the Ti4600 held a solid lead over the Radeon 8500, yet as the resolution increased, the two cards were almost in a dead-heat. We didn't run 1600x1200 in this test since the results would be too low.
On the next page we've run some Quake 3 scores and then we started tinkering with FSAA and Anisotropic filtering to see how the e-GeForce Ti4600 could handle the increased picture quality.
Quake 3 and FSAA
