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Sliding back
into Direct X game play, we have Comanche 4 from Novalogic,
a Military Copter Sim that is big on pretty graphics and fun
factor but light on realism.
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Comanche 4 and Unreal Tournament 2003 Testing |
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Direct X 8 Gaming At Its Finest |
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Once again, this
test is definitely CPU limited and even our fast 3GHz P4
Canterwood setup can't drive the polys fast enough to allow
these cards to stretch their legs. However, the NV35
is taking a short nap here and only pulls ahead of the
Radeon 9800 Pro at 1600X1200 with AA enabled. We're
not sure why this is but again, we would have to point to
driver optimization as the cure.
Unreal
Tournament is a lot more demanding on the Graphic subsystem
as well as the CPU. We ran some high quality optimized
fly by demos in the Antalus map, for some high resolution,
high IQ gaming benchmarks.
Again the
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra roars past the Radeon 9800 Pro by a
solid 20% but the gap closes when 8X Aniso Filtering is
enabled and the lead drops to 14%. Surprisingly, the
NV30 is holding up fairly well here too, versus a R9700 Pro.
Now here's a
twist, we're exposed to a crushing 32% lead by the GeForce
FX 5900 Ultra at 1600X1200 without AA or AF running.
However, turn on 4X AA and the R9800 Pro gets right in the
rear view mirror of the GFFX 5900 Ultra. Enable 8X AF
on top of that and the Radeon 9800 Pro squeaks by. As
the old saying goes, "what's up with that"? We did
this to show you the effect high levels of Ansio Filtering
have on the NVIDIA cards. At 8X AF, the wind is really
taken out of the NV35's sails. NVIDIA still seems to
have some work to do, as far as AA and AF goes, both in IQ
and in driver optimization. Having said that, in our
opinion, 4X AF is the sweet spot, in terms of image quality
and frame rate trade offs.
Speaking of
optimization, did someone say overclocking?
Overclocking and The Wrap-Up
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