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| Performance Comparisons With Novalogic's Comanche 4 |
| Combat Helicopter Sim |
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Comanche 4 |
To give you sim fans a small taste of what these cards can do, we used Novalogic'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. |
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Due to the CPU limitations, we can see that we're close to maximizing the frame rates at 1024x768 with no AA, as the three GeForce FX cards finished within 0.4 frames per second of each other. We'll need to tax the system a little bit more in order to get some meaningful results. Adding some AA and anisotropic filtering causes the 9600XT to drop off considerably, but has much less of an effect on the rest of the cards, especially the BFG 5900XT OC. At 1600x1200, we can begin to see a major decrease in performance with the 5700 Ultra and 9600XT, especially with the AA being applied. The 5900XTs are still capable of putting up close to 40 fps at 4xAA, and between 32-35 fps with some additional filtering enabled.
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| Benchmarks / Comparisons With Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory |
| Q3 Engine Based Freebie |
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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 multi-player 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 lastly with 4X AA and 8X aniso enabled concurrently. |
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Before we wrap things up, we took another look at a DX8-class engine with Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory. The GeForce FX cards seem to thrive on DX8 games, and we saw no exceptions here. At 1024x768, Nvidia's cards were 1-2-3, from the BFG 5900XT OC down to the 5700 Ultra. The 5900XT OC held it's ever so slight advantage over the e-VGA card in all but the 4xAA test at 1600x1200, where they were more memory bandwidth limited than anything else.
