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Gaming Performance
with Gunmetal |
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Something New... |
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We continued our
DirectX benchmarking with a new benchmark called Gun Metal.
This benchmark is based on the game by the same name
produced by
Yeti
Studios. Realizing the need for a true real world
DirectX 9 benchmark that can stress today's powerhouse video
cards, Yeti Studios put together this little gem to bring
any video card to its knees. While that isn't the
overall goal, what they intend to do is truly stress a card
in a way that reflects its true abilities, exposing the GPU
limit, rather than the CPU limit of the system. To
help achieve higher stress levels, Gun Metal is set up with
Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering on by default and it
can't be disabled. Below are the results from running
the "Benchmark 2".
At 800x600
screen resolution, the two cards competed very close, giving
a slight advantage to the GeForce card. Once we
increased the resolution to 1024x768, the Radeon card
dropped significantly in comparison, with the GeForce card
barely dropping a full frame per second. With the
recent questions about nVidia's drivers and some of the bugs
we've seen in the labs here at HH however, we wonder if this
is truly representative of the performance we are seeing.
This is still a
new benchmark to us, so we'll have to keep an eye on it and
see what trends unfold as more hardware is tested. All
in all though, we like it!
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Gaming Performance
with Quake3 v1.32 |
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Old
Reliable... |
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Next up, we have
some OpenGL testing with Quake 3 Arena. Like UT2003,
we ran the test at two common resolutions with varying
visual qualities enabled through the drivers. We ran
each test with the game set for "High Quality", adjusting
only the resolution.
In the basic
tests, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra led by 14FPS at 1024x768
and slipped to a 6FPS lead at 1600x1200. Once we
started to increase the visual qualities however, the Xtasy
model maintained the upper hand, especially at the higher
resolution. At 1024x768 the Radeon based card stayed
on top by roughly 30FPS with the 4X AA and the 4X AA and 8X
Anisotropic filtering tests. At 1600x1200, the GeForce
FX 5800 Ultra really began to give up some ground, giving
the VisionTek Xtasy the lead by an average of 53FPS.
Clearly the ATi card is far more efficient at handling the
additional visual qualities and it's over all image quality
looked better too. This is our subjective opinion of
course but we've seen plenty of graphics hardware and feel
we can judge accordingly.
Serious Sam TSE, Overclocking & the Wrap-up
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