Performance

Game 1 – Wings of Fury

This test uses only DirectX7 instructions and it was the only one that ran on each of the thirteen cards without any problems. Post-processing is off, tri-linear filtering is on:

GeForceFX 5800 Ultra based card wins this test in all resolutions thanks to the highest frequency of the GPU – 500MHz, and the formidable peak fill-rate – up to 4000MTexels/s. RADEON 9700 PRO fell behind as its core works only at 325MHz, and the peak fill-rate with multi-texturing equals 2600MTexels/s.

GeForce4 Ti4800 differs from GeForce4 Ti4600 only in its AGP 8x support. So we can estimate the advantage of the new interface. In fact, AGP 8x brings just a small performance growth here: about 1-1.5 fps. The “Game 1 – Wings of Fury” test doesn’t have huge amounts of textures and vertex matrices: the data easily fit into 128MB of local graphics memory. That’s why there is so little benefit provided by theoretically faster AGP 8x.

As far as the amount of graphics memory is concerned, we can see by the example of the two versions of RADEON 9500 that 128MB instead of 64MB provide a nice speed-up: over 10% in high resolutions.

GeForce4 MX and Xabre 600 are outsiders in this test. In fact, “Game 1 Wings of Fury” was the only test to run on GeForce4 MX. As for Xabre 600, it works smoothly here, but shows poorest performance among all.

Now we turn post-processing on:

Xabre 600 was the only card without post-processing support. That’s why it has zero in the diagram. In comparison with the previous mode, this one brings no significant changes. Moreover, post-processing even led to some speed growth in 1600x1200 resolution. Otherwise, the situation is the same with the same leaders: GeForceFX 5800 Ultra, RADEON 9700 PRO and GeForce4 Ti4800.

Now let’s see the effect of anisotropic filtering on the cards’ performance.

All the cards suffer a significant performance drop. And once again, GeForceFX 5800 Ultra wins the test. Anisotropic filtering results in a performance drop of 1.1–1.6 times by GeForceFX 5800 Ultra. The GeForce4 Ti based cards slow down by 1.5–2 times. We also see the same 1.5 times performance reduction by RADEON 9500 and 9700.

As for Xabre 600, this graphics solution doesn’t support anisotropic filtering at all. Among surprising results, we’ve got GeForce4 MX beating GeForce3 Ti200 and GeForce4 Ti4200-8x. The point is that this GPU only supports 2x anisotropy level, while other participators perform 8x anisotropic filtering.

Next, we turned on full-screen anti-aliasing.

FSAA brings some considerable distortion in the ranks. RADEON 9700 PRO is in the lead now thanks to its broader graphics memory bus. In high resolutions it wins about 20% over GeForceFX 5800 Ultra. Overall, GeForce4 Ti cards lose to RADEON 9500 PRO and 9500 with 128MB or 64MB of memory. The only thing to comfort NVIDIA fans is the win of GeForce3 Ti200 over its immediate rival, RADEON 9100, in 1024x768 and 1280x1024 resolutions.

But there was one problem with 128MB RADEON 9500. It was the only of ATI’s graphics chips to produce the following glitch: vertexes of some polygons are processed incorrectly, so there are lines in the image that are supposed to be invisible. You can see this artifact in the following screenshot:

Now, let’s say a few words about those who didn’t finish. RADEON 9000 couldn’t work stable in any resolution, so we took it off the race. All 64MB cards couldn’t manage 1600x1200 resolution, which is quite natural. Xabre 600 only supports FSAA 2x, so it’s not quite right to compare it with others. Moreover, with FSAA turned on, Xabre 600 displays the image only on one half of the screen in 3DMark03, that is, it performs only a half of the job :). Of course, you can’t play like that, so we didn’t include the results shown by Xabre 600 into the diagram.

The next step includes FSAA with anisotropic filtering.

Although RADEON 9000 and 9500 PRO didn’t make it through the above mode, they did it now. Xabre 600 was not included, as it has no anisotropic filtering support. The simultaneous use of FSAA and anisotropic filtering resulted into the absence of actual leaders in this test session. Up to 1600x1200 resolution the laurels belonged to GeForceFX 5800 Ultra running neck and neck with RADEON 9700 PRO. Only in 1600x1200, RADEON 9700 PRO managed it ahead.

GeForce4 MX440-8x and RADEON 9000 managed all resolutions up to 1024x768 inclusive. In 1280x1024 they disabled anti-aliasing. That’s why they have zeroes in the two highest resolutions. RADEON 9100 and 64MB RADEON 9500 also dropped out of the race in 1600x1200.

We would like to single out the results shown by RADEON 9500 PRO. This graphics card keeps its third place throughout all the resolutions and leaves far behind (almost two times) the cards based on GeForce4 Ti4600 and Ti4800.

Well, the first gaming test, “Wings of Fury”, indicated what performance you can expect from your graphics card in a DirectX7 flight simulator. We can’t say this test illustrates the performance of our testing participants in all other DirectX7 games, but this is the only DirectX7 test in 3DMark03.

Now, it’s time we went over to other tests that require DirectX8 support.