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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 2003 has consistently been one of the more 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 game,
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. We chose to run
the tests at 1024x768x32 and
1280x1024x32 scores for our report, with and without
2X anti-aliasing enabled. |
There's
really no comparison between the two cards in the Unreal
2003 benchmark. On the whole, the Stealth S80 put up
some painfully slow scores, usually about half of what we
got with the GeForce FX 5200 Ultra. To its merit, the
performance hit when applying two samples of AA was minor,
especially when compared to the competition. We still
wouldn't recommend it, however, since it seems we will need
all of the frames we can get to maintain "playable"
conditions.
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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. We used the
Oil Rig demo created by the folks at Beyond 3D to
benchmark with Splinter Cell. 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, as well as the
obvious reasons, we do not have any
AA scores listed in the graphs below. |
These two
graphs told us two things: one, the Stealth S80 lost out to
the 5200 Ultra at both resolutions, and two, we can say with
utmost certainty that neither card should be used to play
this game. We barely were able to get over ten frames
per second at 1024x768 with the 5200 Ultra. Worse, the
Stealth S80 was hovering closer to five fps. Oddly
enough, when actually watching the demo, the performance
didn't seem as bad as the numbers actually were, but you can
be sure we're not going to try playing this game with these
cards anytime
soon.
Comanche 4 and
Wolfenstein - ET
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