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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. |
With all of
the controversy concerning NVIDIA's attempts at driver
optimizations geared towards Anisotropic Filtering, we have
only put up numbers with and without AA enabled At the
lower resolution, the 9600 Pro put up the highest number,
besting the 9600 XT by 7 frames per second. We ran these numbers a
few times to check our results but always came up with the
same numbers. The rest of the scores fell more into
what we had expected, with the 9600 XT back on top, with or
without AA enabled. Both 9600s took a minor hit with
AA when compared to the GeForce FX 5600, which dropped down
almost a third at 4XAA, and another third at 6XAA. At higher resolutions,
the 9600XT beat out the earlier model, and walloped the GF
FX 5600 with a 37% increase in performance.
Anti-aliasing put a big hit into all of the cards,
hitting the Radeons the hardest and leveling the playing
field somewhat. At 4XAA at 1600x1200, the difference
between the Radeon 9600 XT and GeForce FX 5600 had shrunk
to "only" 24%.
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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. |
Again the
two Radeons were victorious in this benchmark, really
pulling away at higher resolutions from the GeForce FX 5600.
The DX9 pixel shaders used in the Caspian Oil Rig Demo are
handled much better by the two ATi cards, and the extra
clock speed of the Radeon 9600 XT made the difference between
the two. The GeForce FX 5600 actually fell behind by
45% at 1600x1200, and only managed to just get over 10
frames per second. If this is evidence of NVIDIA's
current state of affairs when dealing with DX9 games in
their mainstream product, then
it seems they have plenty of work to do...
Final Fantasy & Gun Metal Tests
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