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Performance Comparisons
With Final Fantasy XI v2.0 |
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Chocobos finally make it to the big screen |
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Final Fantasy is a title that is more well known by
console gamers, but it appears that Squaresoft has made
a successful jump to the PC, with a MMORPG version of
the classic. The demo version is equipped with a
built-in benchmark, which displays a score every time it
makes a full cycle. Although the demo is meant the
check an entire system's readiness to play the game, the
number of frames rendered in the demo scales well with
different video cards installed. Lower scores indicated
some frames were dropped to complete the demo in the
allotted time. The scores below were taken with the
demo set to "High Resolution" (1024x768), with
anti-aliasing disabled. |
Well, the
graph pretty much tells the story. To recap, the
Radeon 9800 and 9800XT pulled well ahead of all other cards,
including the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra which they beat by
8-10%. These were the highest scores that we had ever
seen on this particular test rig; where for the first time we eclipsed the
5000 mark here. From the 5950 Ultra to the 5700 Ultra
it was a step like progression on down. The ATi Radeon
9600XT brought up the rear, a full 911 points behind the
9800XT, or a performance delta of about 18%.
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Benchmarking
With
Gun Metal |
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Big
guns + metal robots = Gun Metal |
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We
continued our testing with the pseudo-DX9 based Gun
Metal benchmark developed by Yeti Studios. This
benchmark, like all of the others used in this review,
is based on an actual game engine.
Gun
Metal uses Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 1.1 ops in
the creation of the game world. This test is heavily GPU
limited, and because Yeti's intent was to stress all
modern 3D accelerators, anti-aliasing (2X) and
Anisotropic filtering are enabled by default, and can't
be disabled. We ran this test at 1024x768 and then again
at 1280x1024. |
If we were
to only use Gun Metal as our base of comparison, everyone
would probably only run out and buy GeForce cards (which is
why, of course, we run through a whole suite of games.)
The GFFX cards easily dominated these tests, with the
performance of the 5700 Ultra rivaling that of the mighty
9800XT. The 5950 Ultra was the big winner here with
frame rates that were generally 20% higher than the two
faster Radeons or the 5900XT.
Next Up: Comanche 4 & Wolfenstein: ET
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