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| Performance Comparisons With Novalogic's Comanche 4 |
| Combat Helicopter Sim |
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Comanche 4 |
To give you sim fans a small taste of what these cards can do, we used Novalogic's combat helicopter simulator Comanche 4 for our next batch of DirectX tests. Comanche 4 uses DX8 class pixel and vertex shaders to produce some of the realistic visuals used throughout the game. Unlike some of the previous tests though, this benchmark is heavily influenced by CPU and system memory performance, especially at lower resolutions. However, when the resolution is raised and anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are enabled, the current crop of 3D accelerators tend to slow down quite a bit. |
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At 1024x768, all four of the cards are matched up quite evenly, with the only exception being the 9600XT when 4XAA and Anisotropic Filtering were enabled. It's only at 1600x1200 that we really begin to see some major differences. Originally, the cards all seem to be on an equal footing once again, with only a 3 FPS difference between the two 5900XTs and the 5700Ultra, and then another 4 frames before we get to the 9600XT. 4XAA take its toll on the latter two cards, however, especially for the 9600XT. The hit is less pronounced on the 5900XTs, whose 4x2 architecture and memory bandwidth advantages help to keep the framerates from dropping too far.
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| Benchmarks / Comparisons With Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory |
| Q3 Engine Based Freebie |
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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, and with 4X AA and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently. |
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In our last benchmark, we've almost got a clean sweep by Nvidia once again, as the 5700 Ultra and 5900XT based cards outpaced the ATi 9600XT at both resolutions, with or without anti-aliasing being applied. The sole exceptions to this would be at 1600x1200 when AA and aniso were enabled, where the 9600XT does at least manage to outpace the 5700 Ultra. The 5900XTs are the leaders here, and the two models are evenly matched, with less than a frame per second the difference in any of the tests.
