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The
performance difference between the two cards was even
greater
with Anti-Aliasing enabled. At every resolution, the
Gainward Ultra 750 / XP smoked the Radeon 8500LE.
Seeing playable framerates at 1600x1200 with 2X AA enabled,
with the GF4 Ti 4600 still makes me little giddy! :)
With 4X AA enabled the
Gainward card doubles the performance level of the Radeon
at both resolutions. Neither card was able to
utilize 4X AA at 1600x1200, which is why it is not
represented in the graph above.
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OpenGL Benchmarks with Quake 3 and Anisotropic
Filtering |
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Aniso Goodness! |
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So far, the Radeon 8500LE hasn't
put up too much of a fight. With Anisotropic
filtering enabled in Quake 3, the benchmark scores seemed
to flip-flop in favor of the Radeon. There is a good
reason for this though,
read this page for a detailed explanation as to why ATi
cards outperform NVIDIA cards when Anisotropic filtering
is enabled.
First, we enabled
32-Tap Anisotropic filtering in each card's drivers (8X in
ATi's drivers, 4X in NVIDIA's). The Gainward Ultra
750 / XP's performance nosedived when Anisotropic
filtering was enabled. The Radeon slowed slightly, but the
performance hit wasn't nearly as significant. The Gainward
card lost about 73FPS at 1024x768, while the Radeon
only dropped about 4FPS!
If we increased the quality
even further by enabling 64-Tap Anisotropic
filtering (16X in ATi's drivers, 8X in NVIDIA's),
the Radeon 8500LE was again able to outperform Gainward GF4 Ti 4600 at
every resolution. NVIDIA has promised major
performance improvements when using Anisotropic Filtering
in future revisions of their drivers. Hopefully they'll
deliver soon.
Some Serious Sam: TSE...
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