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Novalogic's
Comanche 4 continues our string of DirectX game testing, but this
test uses DirectX version 8 rather than version 9. Comanche 4 is an
attack helicopter game which tends to rely heavily on the
CPU and memory bandwidth of a system, but enabling the
visual enhancements such as AA and AF puts more of a load on
the graphics card. Let's get this benchmark spinning!
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Head-to-Head Performance
With
Comanche 4 |
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Does
this remind anyone of M*A*S*H? |
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We are finally seeing some
playable frame rates, albeit at a resolution of 800x600.
Enabling AA and AF, however, drops the frame rates
substantially. The Albatron 5200 Ultra graphics card manages to
outperform the Radeon 9000 Pro to the tone of 47% with 4X AA
enabled at 1024x768. That's quite a gap between the two cards and most
of that performance gain can be attributed to the extra 64MB
of RAM on the Albatron card. Also due to its 64 MB of
RAM, the R9000 Pro can only run benchmarks as high as
1024x768 with 4X AA enabled, therefore no numbers are shown
for the 1280x1024 resolution.
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Rock On UT2K3! |
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I
Said Fly By's not Drive By's |
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Sticking with the DirectX theme,
next up is Unreal Tournament 2003. Using a special
utility, we ran a "Fly By" demo on the Citadel level of
this game. Each card is run with the same
exact in game settings making this benchmark as evenly
matched as possible for both cards. Let's see how the
two cards fared.
With AA and AF turned off, both
cards show some good numbers all the way up to the 1280x1024
setting. The Radeon 9000 Pro is
neck and neck with the Albatron FX 5200 Ultra without AA and
AF enabled. Once AA
and AF are enabled, that extra memory and higher fillrate on the Albatron card
shows its worth as it easily outpaces the Radeon 9000 Pro.
When looking at the scores for these two cards, remember that both of these cards are
intended for the gamer on a budget. It is tough to
complain about these numbers when there will be plenty of coin
left in that good 'ole piggy bank. That just about
beats the DirectX benchmarks to a pulp for now. Let's
look at some games based on OpenGL.
OpenGL Benchmarks
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