Chaintech Apogee AA5700U

Chaintech Apogee AA5700U - Page 3

Chaintech Apogee AA5700U
Redefining the meaning of mainstream

By Robert Maloney
March 15th, 2004

Benchmarks With Unreal Tournament 2003
DX8 Performance In The Mainstream

Epix'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 samples.  We kept Anisotropic filtering disabled here because NVIDIA and ATi aren't doing the same level of trilinear filtering when aniso and trilinear are enabled together.

Unreal Tournament 2003 was the first chance we got to see any major differences between the 9600XT and the AA5700U.  In what appears to be the usual case, the 5900XT moved right to the head of the class, leading in each benchmark except when applying 6 samples of anti-aliasing at 1024x768.  The AA5700U took an early lead over the 9600XT when no AA samples were added.  It fell slightly behind at the lower resolution, but the hit was much less pronounced at 1600x1200, allowing it to maintain a decent 45.19 frames per second.  The 9600XT on the other hand, took a drastic loss in performance, only able to produce 26.71 fps.  We weren't able to get reliable 6XAA scores at 1600x1200 on the GeForce cards, possibly due to an issue with the latest ForceWare drivers.  We'll keep you posted if we find out anything further about this.

Head-to-Head Performance With Splinter Cell
Stealth Pixel Shading Redefined

Splinter Cell's version 1.2 patch includes three pre-recorded demos and incorporates a previously unavailable benchmarking tool.  The demos included with the patch are somewhat limited by CPU performance, however, so we used the custom Oil Rig demo created by the folks at Beyond 3D to test with this game.  Beyond 3D's 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 in the demo, as well as simulating a night vision effect.  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.

The 5900XT claimed this benchmark as its own, no questions asked.  The AA5700U and the 9600XT, on the other hand, are neck and neck at both resolutions.  There's no way to paint either as the victor, so we'll have to call it a tie again this time.  What we would like to point out is that the relative placement of the cards has made changed very little since the first time we paired them up, even with newer Catalyst and ForceWare drivers.

Final Fantasy & Gun Metal Tests    


Tags:  Tech, Apogee, 5700, chaintech, AA, 570, A5, AP, AI, A57

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