HIS Excalibur X800 Pro - VIVO Edition with IceQ II
 |
|
 Wolfenstein: ET |
We also ran through a batch of time demos with the OpenGL game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Wolfenstein: ET is a free, standalone multi player game that is based on the excellent Return to Castle Wolfenstein that was released a few years back. It uses a heavily modified version of the Quake 3 engine, which makes it a very easy to use benchmarking tool. We created our own custom demo and used the built-in time demo feature to check each card's frame-rate. The tests below were run at 1024x768 and again at 1600x1200, without anti-aliasing, with 4X AA, with 4X AA and 8X aniso and lastly with 4X AA and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently. |
When you look at the results of the X800 Pro with Wolfenstein: ET, one might think something is wrong. In fact, with the previous version of the Catalysts, ATI acknowledged there was a problem, which has now been corrected in v4.7. Even so, with each increase of quality in the drivers, the scores didn't budge at 1024 x 768, yet the GeForce cards registered the steady decrease as expected. Only after we switched to 1600 x1200 did we find the scores for the X800 series begin to register some form of a hit. What we found with this test is that the CPU really plays a large role. In fact, if you look at one of our other reviews that uses a Pentium 4 at 2.4GHz, you'll find this doesn't occur. So when you marry a high-end ATi card and a fast processor, Wolfenstein: ET is poised to steal the show. Nevertheless, the GeForce cards still follow the typical trend of severe performance shifts once Anisotropic Filtering is introduced to the mix.
