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Benchmarks / Comparison
With Tomb Raider - Angel Of Darkness |
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More more "full bodied" carnage with Lara,
now DX9, as well as surgically enhanced! |
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Tomb Raider - Angel
Of Darkness is one of those games that you
either love or hate. We have a mixed
opinion amongst the team here at HotHardware on
this game engine. However, it does employ
some fairly impressive DX9 effects and has
impressive scenery without question.
There's just something about that third person
perspective and the navigational movement of
your main character, that can sometimes leave
you frustrated from a game-play standpoint. |
| We've recorded
a custom demo run of Lara jogging through a indoor garden
area of the "Prague3" map. This area of the game
utilizes a DOF (depth of field) blurring effect to enhance
your sense of depth and vastness of the area. It's
actually quite impressive the first time you load up this
area of the game map.
We'll sum this one up
quickly for you here as well. "Game Over"... Although
we've shown you earlier in this article, that NVIDIA's image
quality has vastly improved in this game engine, especially
in this area of the game where we recorded our custom demo,
there is still a definitive 18 - 20% lead for ATi with Tomb
Raider AOD. Again however, NVIDIA seems to have made
good progress, versus what we saw in the 51.75 Detonator FX
release.
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Benchmarks / Comparison
With
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory |
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New
Game, Better Effects, Radically Enhanced Quake 3
Engine |
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Wolfenstein: Enemy
Territory by all rights, should be included in the
"geriatric" game engine demographic, although its focus
is on OpenGL testing
(and yes, that means Quake 3 Arena is officially gone
from our test suite).
Wolfenstein:
ET is a free standalone multiplayer game that is based
on the original Return to Castle Wolfenstein release.
It uses a modified
and enhanced Quake3 engine, and is still one of the few
OpenGL titles we have to work with for benchmarks, until
Doom3 is released. |
We used the
built-in timedemo benchmark, with a customer demo, which
plays back a recorded multiplayer session, we took from an
online spectator view of a free-for-all death match.
As we've already shown you
in our
Radeon 9800XT article recently, ATi cards take a sound
thrashing in this game engine and when you enable AA or
Aniso Filtering, it only exacerbates the situation.
Could it be that ATi's driver team has less support and
focus on OpenGL titles? Or is this just a game engine
that ATi isn't bothering with anymore since it's slowing
dieing out of the mainstream. Regardless, if this is
any indication at all, of what ATi's hardware will run like
on Id's next generation game engine for Doom3, they better
get cracking because NVIDIA clearly has the edge in legacy
Id code, as much as 55 - 60% with AA enabled. And
we've also shown you earlier here, that image quality is
comparable, so we can't point to that as a differentiator
either.
AquaMark3 And Halo Benchmarks!
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