NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT - Value Based PCI-Express Part II
Benchmarks / Comparisons With Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
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 Wolfenstein: ET |
We also ran through a batch of timedemos with the OpenGL game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Wolfenstein: ET is a free, standalone multiplayer 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 timedemo 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. |
In Wolfenstein: ET, the GeForce 6600 GT won the non AA driven tests within a minimum 20 FPS lead over the X600 XT. When we switched over to the 4X AA/8X Anisotropic testing, we found our first anomaly though. At 1024x768, things looked normal, with the 6600 GT holding a 42FPS lead over the Radeon X600 XT. However, when we increased the resolution to 1600x1200, the 6600's performance took a severe hit, dropping over 67FPS compared to the 1024x768 results. This gave the X600 XT nearly double the performance while the 5750 barely registered on the scales. Clearly, there is an issue, but we are uncertain of the cause. It looks mostly like a driver issue for NVIDIA with this benchmark, just due to the fact that the 5750 suffered the same anomaly. This is not a real show stopper when you look at the age of Wolfenstein: ET, whose lifespan as a valid benchmark is reaching "Quake3" status. We'd be more concerned if the trend appears in any other tests, but it didn't.
Update: We asked NVIDIA for their input on this anomaly, and were told they couldn't replicate the problem. On their test system the 6600 hit 90.7 FPS without AA and 48.2 FPS for 4x/8x, using the same drivers. This is probably an issue with our test system and won't affect the vast majority of users.
