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With each new video card's
release, Quake 3 becomes less and less of a relevant
benchmark at its default settings. When we
continually turn up the quality and enable 4X AA though,
it's still able to slow most video cards currently
available down to a crawl.
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Even More OpenGL Benchmarks with Quake 3 and 4X
AA |
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Pouring it on! |
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With 4X Anti-Aliasing enabled
(again in "Performance" mode on the Radeons), the GeForce
4 Ti4200s continued to outpace the other cards by a very
significant margin. At 1280x1024, performance dipped
below what we would consider playable levels, but at
1024x768 the timedemos sped along at smooth, very playable
frame rates. Once again, the faster memory on the
64MB cards from Gainward and MSI enabled them to take the
lead. Anisotropic Filtering test are up next.
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More
OpenGL Benchmarks with Quake 3 and 32-Tap Aniso |
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Turning Up the
Quality |
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Anisotropic filtering is a
method for filtering textures that, unlike bi-linear or
tri-linear filtering, works properly on non-uniform, or
odd shaped areas. This type of filtering requires
much more processing power though, so in some instances
the performance hit can be significant. If you've been on
top of the 3D video card scene for a while, you probably
know that ATi and NVIDIA GPUs perform Anisotropic
filtering very differently. Also, what NVIDIA calls
32-Tap Anisotropic filtering (4X in their drivers) is not
what ATi calls 32-Tap Anisotropic filtering (8X in their
drivers). Another thing to consider is that the
Radeons can't do trilinear filtering when Anisotropic
filtering is enabled. The differing methods and
capabilities traditionally gave ATi a huge performance
advantage over NVIDIA. It seems that NVIDIA has been
optimizing their drivers though, as ATi's performance
advantage has, for the most part, been eaten away.
In fact, if we dropped Quake 3 down to bilinear filtering,
the Ti4200s actually out ran the Radeons.
More Quake 3...
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