AOpen GeForce FX 5900XT Review
Wolfenstein: ET and Comanche 4
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 Wolfenstein: ET |
We also ran through a batch of timedemos with the OpenGL game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Wolfenstein: ET is a free, standalone multiplayer game that is based on the excellent Return to Castle Wolfenstein, that was released a few years back. It uses a heavily modified version of the Quake 3 engine, which makes it a very easy to use benchmarking tool. We created our own custom demo and used the built-in timedemo feature to check each card's frame-rate. The tests below were run at 1024x768 and again at 1600x1200, without anti-aliasing, with 4X AA and with 4X AA and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently. |
At 1024x768, the scores for all of the cards we tested were respectable, with the AOpen 5900XT taking the top slot. When we ran the test at 1600x1200, the comparison cards began to feel the heat, especially the 9600XT, which all but choked with any filtering enabled. Interestingly, the difference between the two 5900XTs was 5FPS in almost every test. The only time they tied was with no filtering enabled at 1024x768, showing some CPU limitation at this level.
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 Comanche 4 |
To give you sim fans a small taste of what these cards can do, we used Nova Logic's combat helicopter simulator Comanche 4 for our next batch of DirectX tests. Comanche 4 uses DX8 class pixel and vertex shaders to produce some of the realistic visuals used throughout the game. Unlike some of the previous tests though, this benchmark is heavily influenced by CPU and system memory performance, especially at lower resolutions. However, when the resolution is raised and anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are enabled, the current crop of 3D accelerators tend to slow down quite a bit. |
Comanche 4 is known for its heavy CPU dependency, which is most evident in the 1024x768 tests. Here, we see a very even turnout with all cards, obviously the effects of being CPU-bound. Once we ran the test at 1600x1200, the story changed. Here, all models returned similar scores with the No AA test, but once we started turning on Anti-aliasing and Anisotropic filtering, the scales leaned in favor of the 5900XTs, which suffered the smallest performance hit overall.
