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The
performance delta between these two cards gets even larger
when Anti-Aliasing is enabled. At all resolutions,
the GeForce 4 Ti 4600 decimated the 8500LE, as well it
should considering it also cost almost 2X the price of the
Radeon 8500LE card. What is most interesting to me
is that even at 1600x1200 with 2X AA enabled, the GeForce
4 Ti 4600 is completely playable at just over 70FPS.
NVIDIA claims
that through architectural enhancements, the GeForce 4 Ti
is now capable of running their Quincunx AA mode at the
exact same performance levels of their 2X AA, and they are
right, for the most part! At 1024 and 1280, Quincunx
AA was just as fast as 2X AA, but once we hit 1600X1200,
things changed a bit and Quincunx lagged behind 2X AA by
about 9FPS. It seems that as more memory bandwidth
is used, Quincunx causes a larger performance drop.
Using 4X AA,
incredibly the GeForce 4 Ti 4600 more than doubles the
performance levels of the Radeon 8500LE at all
resolutions. I'm sure you noticed that both cards
appeared to be faster at 1600X1200 with 4X AA than at
1280x1024. This is due to limitations with both
chipsets. 4X AA at 1600x1200 is a little too much
for either card to handle, so both cards dropped down to
2X AA to be able to run Quake 3 properly. NVIDIA has
informed us that the 4X AA mode at 1600X1200 resolution is
currently non-functional with Quake3 but they plan to fix
it soon.
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OpenGL Benchmarks with Quake 3 and Anisotropic
Filtering |
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The End is Near! |
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Up to this
point, the Radeon 8500 LE hasn't fared too well against
Visiontek's card powered by NVIDIA's flagship GeForce 4 Ti
4600 GPU, but the benchmarks took a dramatic turn once we
started testing Quake 3 with Anisotropic filtering enabled
(check
out this link for a more detailed explanation of how ATi
and NVIDIA perform Anisotropic filtering)...
In this test,
we enabled 32-Tap Anisotropic filtering in each card's
drivers (8X in ATi's drivers, 4X in NVIDIA's). The
GeForce 4 Ti 4600 took an enormous performance hit when
Anisotropic filtering was enabled. The Radeon did
slow a bit, but the performance hit was nowhere near as
dramatic. The GeForce 4 Ti dropped about 110FPS at
1280X1024, while the Radeon only dropped about 7FPS!
The performance hit was so significant, the Radeon 8500LE
actually outpaced the GeForce 4 Ti 4600 at every
resolution!
With 64-Tap
Anisotropic filtering enabled (16X in ATi's drivers, 8X in
NVIDIA's), the Radeon 8500LE again schooled the GeForce 4
Ti 4600 at every resolution. It appears that NVIDIA
has some major work to do with their drivers before using
Anisotropic filtering becomes commonplace on their GPUs.
Some Serious Sam SE...
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