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Before you
look at all of the benchmark scores, we want you to keep
in mind that all of the cards used in this article were
clocked at the exact same speeds, were using the same
driver revision and settings and were installed on the
same test system. All of these similarities will
explain the lack of any performance deltas from one card
to the next.
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DirectX 8 Benchmarks with Max Payne |
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Remedy's Winner |
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The first test
we ran were using Remedy's best selling Max Payne.
Due to the fact that this game does not have any
"built-in" timedemo feature, we used the mods and followed
the instructions provided by the folks at
3DCenter.De. This benchmark is very taxing on
the host CPU and video subsystem. Actual "in-game"
performance should be higher.
We set all of
the graphical options in Max Payne's control panel to
"High" with trilinear filtering for the first batch of
tests. As you can see, at 1024x768, the Abit board
simply dominated the competition with a huge .1 FPS lead
over it's nearest competitor! (That's a joke
people...)
At 1280x1024,
again there is very little variation in the scores.
(Which is to be expected) Scores in the mid-30s in
this test place the GeForce 4 MX 440's performance
in-between a Radeon 8500 LE and GeForce 4 Ti.
As we
increased the resolution, there was a sharp drop off in
performance. The MX 440's dropped about 14 frames
per second when jumping from 1024x768 to 1600x1200, which
is about a 35% reduction.
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More
Max Payne with Anisotropic Filtering |
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Bullet Time is so
cool! |
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If you've been
following the "scene" (no pun intended) lately, you've no
doubt heard the tern "Anisotropic" filtering tossed
around. Anisotropic filtering generally improves the
"clarity" of textures, by making them looked less blurred
or washed out. However, this increased visual quality,
usually results in a performance hit.
We enabled
Anisotropic filtering in the Max Payne control panel and
ran the benchmark at the same three resolutions.
While it's not quite clear exactly what level of
Anisotropic filtering is applied by enabling this setting
in the game, these are the kind of performance levels you
can expect by doing so.
So far at
1024x768 and 1280x1024, the MX 440's lost about a single
frame per second by enabling Anisotropic filtering within
Max Payne. which is nothing to get excited about.
Let's go even higher...
At 1600x1200
we see more of the same, with performance again dropping
about one frame per second. The level of Anisotropic
filtering enabled with the in-game setting is probably not
very high though. In our last few GeForce 4 and
Radeon 8500 reviews, we explored Anisotropic filtering a
little further and saw huge performance drops with NVIDIA
GPUs, in the neighborhood of 50% in come cases.
On to
OpenGL with Quake 3
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