Albatron Gigi GeForce FX 5200 Ultra

The Albatron Gigi - GeForce FX 5200 Ultra
Mainstream With Muscle?

By - Tom Laverriere
October 28, 2003

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!

Head-to-Head Performance With Comanche 4 Does this remind anyone of M*A*S*H?

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.
 

Rock On UT2K3! I Said Fly By's not Drive By's

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