|
Since I consider
myself as a "hardcore gamer", I am always more interested in
real-world scores with current games, that Q3 numbers or
synthetic benchmarks. I like something that gives us a
more precise showing of what kind of performance to expect with today's
games. To do so, I used Serious Sam and Jedi Knight 2 for
OpenGL testing, and Comanche 4 for DirectX.
 |
|
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter |
|
Move over Duke
Nukem, the new Alien-bashing king has arrived |
|
|
|
First on my list
was Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. Still hung up at the
cliffhanger end of the first game, I wanted to see what I
could expect when playing the second one with these new
video cards. I configured the game to use OpenGL and ran the
"Little Trouble" demo using the "Maximum Quality" script,
created by the folks at Beyond3D, to max out the texture and
filtering quality. We use these scripts
because the game will actually try to optimize the engine for whichever
card you are using. By using this script, we used the same
parameters for all tests...
All cards
produced nice results, and the Radeon overtook the GeForce
3. Once we moved up to the higher resolutions, the
performance delta between the Ti 4600 and the 4200s begins
to truly manifest itself, although the difference between
the two 4200s is minimal, 3fps at best. The Radeon and the
GF3 cards really start to drop off at 1600x1200.
|
|
|
Novalogic's Comanche 4 Benchmark |
|
Direct 3D Testing
on a leading edge Flight Sim |
|
Next up was Novalogic's Comanche
4 Demo. Comanche 4 makes use of DirectX8 Pixel and Vertex
shaders, and is a useful tool for testing performance under
DirectX 8. As the demo comes with built-in benchmarking
routines, it is very easy to use and truly one of the better
demos to watch, especially after running so many tests.
(Ed. Note: After almost 4 years watching Quake 3 timedemos,
a variety in benchmarks is welcome.)
In the first graph, all three of
the GF4 cards ran neck and neck, and it's obvious that at
1024x768 the limiter is probably not the video card, but
instead the CPU. Once we start running the demo at
higher resolutions, however, we can see where the faster
core speed, and the more ample RAM on the Asus card really
make a difference. At 1600x1200, the Asus Ti 4200, with 128MB,
has the Best Data Ti 4200, with only 64MB, beat by over 6
frames per second. The Ti 4600 ruled the roost though.
Jedi Knight & Max Payne
|
