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Benchmarks
With Unreal Tournament 2003 |
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DX8
Performance In The Mainstream |
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Epic's Unreal
Tournament has consistently been one of the most popular
shooters, and by no coincidence is it also one of the
most used benchmarks for video card testing. There
are many variants to testing the demo version,
one of which is to
use a "Flyby", which plays back a recorded tour of one
of the levels. Here in the labs, we use a custom
INI file that maximizes the graphical settings, and then
displays the average frame rate for three strenuous
resolutions. We chose the 1024x768x32 and
1600x1200x32 scores for our reports, with and without
anti-aliasing enabled. |
Seems like the story will
stay the same here, with ATi keeping its lead. The
biggest surprise is at the 6X AA setting at 1024x768
resolution. The AOpen FX 5600 falls behind here by a
whopping 64% to the 9600 Pro and 68% to the 9600 XT.
Even with NVIDIA's latest drivers and the extra memory, the
AOpen FX 5600 card is a far cry from the ATI 9600 series of
cards. This speaks volumes of the hardware in use by
the cards here. Perhaps the FX 5600 GPU just doesn't
have the muscle compared to the 9600 VPU? The good
news is that for mainstream cards, we are still seeing some
solid frame rates.
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Head-to-Head Performance
With
Splinter Cell |
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Stealth Pixel Shading Redefined |
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Splinter Cell's version 1.2
patch includes three demos in addition to a benchmarking
feature, but this appears to be more CPU limited than
VPU. So, in order to come up with some more
meaningful results, we used the Oil Rig demo created by
the folks at Beyond 3D. This demo removes two CPU
intensive routines while increasing dependence on Pixel
Shader performance. Shaders are used to render the
realistic looking ocean water surrounding the Oil Rig,
as well as simulating a night vision display.
As we've mentioned in the past, anti-aliasing
doesn't work with Splinter cell (at least with the
current version). Due to this fact, we do not have
any AA scores listed in the graphs below. |
We feel like a broken
record again, as the ATi 9600 cards again pull away from the
AOpen FX 5600. The higher resolution creates an even
larger gap in favor of the ATi cards, leading us to believe
that the extra memory on the AOpen card is pretty much a
novelty at this point, since fill rate of the GPU is really
where the bottleneck is. Next up in our suite of tests
are Final Fantasy and Gun Metal.
Final Fantasy & Gun Metal Tests
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