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Gaming Benchmarks |
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The proof is in the pudding...whatever than
means |
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ID's Quake 3 Arena:
Even though there are newer
games to use when benchmarking,
no other test is as well used and well known as Quake 3 Arena. Although the scores have
become more and more inflated, we still use this benchmark
since it produces reliable results, and can give good
comparisons between like systems and components. The
latest benchmark routine consists of upgrading to the 1.32
point release, and then launching demo four from the
console. We
ran two sets of scores, one a "low quality" setup where the
game was set to use a resolution of 640x480 using 16-bit
color settings, and then again at a so-called "high quality", which was
at 1024x768x32 with more robust graphical settings.
The four boards are, for the
most part, evenly matched. The slight nod goes to the
VIA P4PB Ultra with its five frames per second lead over the
other three boards. At these speeds, however, this
would be impossible to notice with the naked eye. Once
we juiced the Abit BH7 up to 163MHz, we were able to get
over 35 extra frames per second, topping out just shy of 275
fps.
Using the higher quality
settings, the VIA board went from first to third, with the
MSI board taking the top spot. The Abit BH7 came in
second, three frames per second behind the VIA P4PB.
Again, overclocking the BH7 pushed it up and over the
competition, and gave us a frame rate that even beat all of
the boards in the last test as well.
Novalogic's
Comanche 4 Demo:
A popular DirectX benchmarking
program is Novalogic's Comanche 4. Since this benchmark is
more CPU dependant than other games, the scores seem lower
than what one usually expects from a gaming-type benchmark.
However, we can get a good feel
for the overall system performance by comparing the
benchmarked results.
The scores at stock speeds
followed the same pattern as with Quake 3 at 1024x768, with
the MSI board layin' the smack down on the other boards,
putting that extra memory bandwidth to use. The extra
bandwidth results in a 4% increase over the nearest
challenger, which turned out to be the BH7. The other
two boards were following closely behind. Overclocking
the BH7 gave us an extra 17% in performance by raising the
frame rate by almost an additional 8 frames per second.
Unreal
Tournament 2003 Demo:
A relative newcomer to the
testing benchmark scene would be the Unreal Tournament 2003
demo. We ran the Antalus Fly-By Demo at the same three
resolutions on all systems to see how well this card handled
a more leading edge graphics engine. To aid us with this
test, we used a "High Quality" scripts to automate
the process.
The scores that we obtained at
1600x1200 were all within a few tenths of each other, all
except the MSI 655 Max that is. One interesting score
to point out is that overclocking the BH7 had little effect
on the frame rates at the higher resolutions, which
indicated that we were more or less being held back by the
limitations of the video card. We were able to pick up
a few frames at 1024x768, however.
Final benchmark
routines and the Conclusion
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