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Performance Comparisons
With Final Fantasy XI v2.0 |
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Fulfill Your Fantasy |
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Final Fantasy is a title that is more well known by
console users, but it appears that Squaresoft is ready
to make the jump to the PC, with a MMORPG version of the
classic. The demo version comes bundled with a
benchmark, which displays a final score every time it
makes a full cycle. Although it was meant more for
checking a system's readiness to play the game, we found
that we could get a meaningful test by setting it to
high-res and then dividing the final score (rendered
frames) by the time elapsed, to get the frame rate. |
Surprise, ATi is at it
again. Besides beating on this recurring theme, it's
also worth noting that Final Fantasy has put its own beating
on these budget video cards. It seems to us at least,
that some of these mainstream cards may not be able to
handle every new gaming title out there. These frame
rates you're seeing do not make playing the game impossible,
but it was a bit grueling.
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Benchmarks / Comparison
With
Gun Metal |
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Impressive Gameplay |
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Yeti Studios has also released a benchmark that is based
on a real game. According to Yeti, it is designed
to push the latest DX9 based cards to the limit using
Pixel and Vertex Shaders to display a rapidly changing
battlefield. To help achieve this, anti-aliasing
and anisotropic filtering are built into the engine, and
cannot be disabled. As such, the average frame rates are
lower than one should expect with the actual game, so
don't be discouraged by the scores that you see in the
graphs below. The benchmark was run twice; once at
1024x768x32, and again at 1280x1024x32. |
Gun Metal appears to be
taxing these cards once again. Worth noting is that
the AOpen FX 5600 has finally managed to pull ahead of the
9600 Pro at the 1280x1024 setting. While an increase
of almost 5% is nothing to get too excited about, this
benchmark denies ATi of the clean sweep throughout the
benchmarks. Maybe this performance can be accredited
to the extra memory on the AOpen FX 5600, but again it is
hard to say so irrefutably since many factors are at play
here. Next up we have the ageless Comanche 4 and
Wolfenstein ET.
Next Up: Comanche 4 & Wolfenstein
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