128MB Radeon 8500 LEs Vs. NVIDIA's GeForce4 Ti 4200 !!

NVIDIA's GF4 Ti4200 Vs. Radeon 8500LEs
From Apollo Graphics and ATi
Mainstream Graphics Cards Do Battle...

By - Marco Chiappetta
April 11, 2002

The Radeon 8500 LEs haven't been able to catch the Ti 4200 in raw performance or with anti-aliasing enabled just yet.  However, what will happen when we start tinkering with anisotropic filtering, in the OpenGL based Q3 engine?  Let's find out.

OpenGL Benchmarks with Quake 3 and Anisotropic Filtering Still Lookin' Good

Whoa, there's something new!  The Radeon 8500 LEs smoked the GeForce 4 Ti 4200, once we enabled anisotropic filtering!  We have to mention that ATi and NVIDIA do Anisotropic filtering differently.  What NVIDIA calls 32-Tap Anisotropic filtering (4X in their drivers) is not what ATi calls 32-Tap Anisotropic filtering (8X in their drivers) and all things considered, NVIDIA's filtering quality looks better.  Also, the Radeon 8500 LE can't do true trilinear filtering when Anisotropic filtering is enabled. So to somewhat level the playing field, we set Quake 3 to bilinear filtering for these tests.  For a decent explanation of how each of these cards does Anisotropic filtering, check out this link from Rivastation.

We maxed out the Anisotropic filtering levels for all of the cards (8X in NVIDIA's drivers, 16X in ATI's), ran the same set of time demos and saw an even larger performance delta, with the Radeon's once again dominating the Ti 4200.  The most interesting thing we saw here was how small of a performance hit the Radeons took, when enabling Anisotropic filtering.

OpenGL Benchmarks with Serious Sam SE Time to get Serious

 
Serious Sam:  The Second Encounter, is Croteam's latest shooter using their "Serious Engine".  The game is filled with high resolution textures and a ton of different effects.  It can also be set to run using either OpenGL or DirectX.  We set the game up to use OpenGL and used the included "Little Trouble" demo to test each card.

It looks like the Radeon 8500 LEs were very comfortable running Serious Sam: TSE and managed to run side by side with the GeForce 4 Ti 4200.  Notice how the slightly slower memory on the Apollo Graphics Devil Monster II (460MHz. DDR), held it back and was bested by the Ti 4200, while the ATi reference card, with its faster memory (500MHz. DDR), beat the Ti 4200 at the higher resolutions.

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