S3's DeltaChrome


S3's DeltaChrome - Page 5

The S3 DeltaChrome S8 & S8 Nitro
A Veteran Re-Enters The Fray...

By, Marco Chiappetta
March 9, 2004

Performances Comparisons With Final Fantasy XI Benchmark 2 v1.01
Chocobos on the PC


Final Fantasy XI

The Final Fantasy franchise is well known to console gamers, but Squaresoft has since made the jump to the PC with a MMORPG version of this classic. The Final Fantasy XI benchmark runs through multiple scenes from the game and displays a final score every time a full cycle of the demo is completed. Although the demo is meant the check an entire system's readiness to play the game, the number of frames rendered scales with different video cards installed. Lower scores indicate some frames were dropped to complete the demo in the allotted time. The scores below were taken with the demo set to "High Resolution" (1024x768), with anti-aliasing disabled.

Things began to turn around a bit for the DeltaChromes in the Final Fantasy XI benchmark.  Yet again, they were the slowest of the 5 cards to be benchmarked, but in this test the performance deltas were much smaller than what we have seen up to this point.  For all intents and purposes, the DeltaChrome S8 Nitro and Radeon 9600 XT performed at the same level in this test with only 24 points (.005%) separating them.  With its slightly lower clock speeds, the S8 came in 223 points behind the Nitro model at 4119, which is still a respectable score in this test.

Benchmarks / Comparison With Gun Metal
Transformers? Thexder? or is it Gun Metal?


Gun Metal

We continued our testing with the pseudo-DX9 based Gun Metal benchmark developed by Yeti Studios. This benchmark, like all of the others used in this review, is based on an actual game engine. Gun Metal uses Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 1.1 ops in the creation of the game world. This test is heavily GPU limited, and because Yeti's intent was to stress all modern 3D accelerators, anti-aliasing (2X) and Anisotropic filtering are enabled by default, and can't be disabled. We ran this test at 1024x768 and then again at 1280x1024.

Looking at the graphs above, two things become clear.  One, the DeltaChromes were significantly outpaced by the competition, and two, the new Forceware 56.56 drivers give the GeForce cards a nice performance boost in this test.  The 5700 Ultra smoked the Radeon 9600 XT, which in turn crushed the DeltaChromes.  At 1024x768, the DeltaChrome S8 Nitro performed about 27.7% lower than the next fastest card, the Radeon 9600 XT.  The same held true at 1600x1200 where the S8 Nitro was about 24% slower.

Next Up: Comanche 4 & Wolfenstein


Tags:  S3, Chrome, Delta, rom, AC

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