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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.
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OpenGL Benchmarks with Quake 3 and Anisotropic
Filtering |
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Still Lookin' Good |
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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.
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OpenGL Benchmarks with Serious Sam SE |
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Time to get Serious |
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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.
More SS and Final Words
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