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Benchmarking With Comanche4 and Serious Sam
SE |
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A Little Bit
DirectX and a Little Bit OpenGL... |
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Comanche 4:
Comanche4 is one of the most
popular DirectX benchmarking applications on the web today.
The utility does an excellent job of stressing the most
powerful video cards available, making it work for every FPS
it puts out. So let's get to it and see how the Ti4600
from eVGA held up in this round of torture.
Initially one might
think the Ti4600 had difficulty beating the Ti500, inching
past it by a meager 2.83 frames-per-second. However
what we are seeing is the limitation of the CPU rather than
a fault of the card. Once we start increasing the
resolution, it's a safe bet that the comparison cards will not be
able to sustain the same rate as the more powerful GeForce4.
At 1280x1024x32 we begin to see
the comparison cards lose a bit more ground than the eVGA
e-GeForce4 Ti4600. Let's see how things change at
1600x1200x32...
Notice how the
other two cards take a nose dive while the eVGA e-GeForce4
Ti4600 lost less than 2 FPS from beginning to end.
Clearly the Ti4600 video card is the superior graphic card.
But hey, DirectX is only half of the story. Next we'll
fire up some OpenGL benchmarks and see how the three cards
handle the pressure.
Serious Sam
SE:
Our first test
is one of the few benchmark utilities that can test both
DirectX and OpenGL, Serious Sam SE. Serious Sam SE is
also one of the few utilities that can actually detect which
video card is installed and adjust the settings for optimal
performance. Although we feel this is great for
game play, as a benchmark this can make for lopsided scores
since the program plays to the strengths of the video card
that is installed. To help even the playing field,
we've opted to use a series of scripts that
Anthony "Reverend" Tan has put together that helps to level the playing field
between the various cards. In our tests we ran the
script for "Max Quality" settings, with no anisotropic filtering
enabled and set the resolution and color depth accordingly.
To show how well the utility
stresses a card, note how in the first test the Ti4600 held
a solid lead over the Radeon 8500, yet as the resolution
increased, the two cards were almost in a dead-heat. We
didn't run 1600x1200 in this test since the results would be
too low.
On the next page
we've run some Quake 3 scores and then we started tinkering
with FSAA and Anisotropic filtering to see how the e-GeForce
Ti4600 could handle the increased picture quality.
Quake 3 and FSAA
