To get some OpenGL benchmarks we updated Quake 3 Arena with
the most recent v1.32 Point Release, and ran timedemo
"Four". While it can be said that Quake 3
is past its prime as a benchmark, we find it is still
useful for demonstrating the relative performance of one
product versus another. We set the game to its "High
Quality" mode, enabled Trilinear filtering and maxed out
the texture quality and geometry sliders before running
any tests...
When it came to running an
OpenGL based game such as Quake 3 Arena, the Tyan Tachyon
G9500 Pro didn't fare as well as it had in the previous
benchmarks. Without AA enabled, and even when using
two samples of AA, the two GeForce 4 cards came out on top
at both resolution settings. It was only after we
applied 4 samples of Anti-Aliasing that the Tachyon
regained the lead. When it did so, however, it
really turned the tables with the relative difference
between the benchmarks being 25% or greater. In
fact, at 1600x1200 with 4XAA and 8XAF applied, the Tachyon
almost doubled the framerates of the two GF4 cards.
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Unreal Tournament 2003
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...and something new |
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Whereas Quake 3 represents one
of the older benchmark routines, Epic's
DirectX powered Unreal Tournament 2003 comes in as one of
the newest. UT2003's graphics
are the kind that keep video card manufacturers in business,
if you get my meaning. To keep the playing field level, we used a
custom .INI file that insures all of the cards tested were
using the exact same in-game settings...
At 1024x768 and 1600x1200, with no AA or
Anisotropic filtering enabled, the Tyan Tachyon G9500 Pro
was about 25%
faster than the GeForce 4 Ti4600 in UT2003's "FlyBy"
timedemo. We then saw the same drop-off with both
cards, as each lost about 25% of their respective framerates
when 2 samples of AA were applied. As we have seen
before, it was when we used 4XAA that the Radeon based card
really pulled away from the pack. The "hit" taken when
going from 2XAA to 4XAA was minimal on the Tachyon as
opposed to the Geforce 4 based cards. While not
entirely "playable", we were able to get over 30 frames per
second with both AA and Anisotropic Filtering enabled at
1600x1200 with the Tachyon G9500 Pro. The two GeForce 4 cards only produced a
measly 9 fps when using the same settings.
Overclocking and the
Conclusion
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