Game 2 – Battle of Proxycon

The more complex test, “Battle of Proxycon”, uses pixel and vertex shaders of DirectX 8.1. GeForce4 MX440-8x leaves us here, because it doesn’t support this version of the Microsoft’s API. Well, we have just lost one player; let’s see what the others can show!

We will start out with the simplest task: tri-linear filtering without post-processing.

“Battle of Proxycon” test uses ver.1.4 pixel shaders. This allows rendering a scene within fewer passes than in case of ver.1.1 pixel shaders. 3DMark03 package doesn’t require the graphics card to support ver.1.4 pixel shaders to run “Battle of Proxycon”. If the card supports only 1.1 version, 3DMark03 will use it to render the scene, although in this case more passes will be needed.

It’s quite natural that the cards based on RADEON 9500, 9500 PRO and 9700 PRO chips are notably faster than GeForce4 Titanium based ones. Even the slowest RADEON 9500 with 64MB memory outperforms GeForce4 Ti4800 nearly in all resolutions.

The winner of “Battle of Proxycon” is GeForceFX 5800 Ultra, which performs best in all resolutions. RADEON 9700 PRO and 9500 PRO are second and third, respectively. These three graphics chips support ver.1.4 pixel shaders; the difference in their results is only due to the difference in their clock-rates and the number of working pipelines.

Surprisingly, RADEON 9000 works faster in this test than RADEON 9100. The reason again lies with the pixel shaders, namely with the way they have been implemented. RADEON 9000 graphics chip was developed long after RADEON 8500 (now renamed into RADEON 9100). And the pixel shaders units of RADEON 9000 have been improved over RADEON 9100. And as the execution speed of pixel shaders is crucial in “Battle of Proxycon”, the younger RADEON proves brisker than the oldie, although has fewer texturing modules and lower peak fill-rate. At the same time, we can’t find a reasonable explanation of the fact that GeForce3 Ti200, which doesn’t support ver.1.4 pixel shaders and works at lower frequencies than RADEON 9100 and 9000, manages to defeat both in this test.

Xabre 600 shows the lowest results. But the failure is not only about performance. This graphics chip cannot reproduce dynamic lighting in the scene. There are also problems with texture rendering. They result in artifacts like black dots and stripes:

Looks like SiS programmers are spending little time writing Xminator drivers. They have still quite a lot to do :) .

By the way, NVIDIA GeForce4 Titanium series also generate certain image artifacts in the second gaming test. They are not so evident as those noticed by Xabre 600, but are still very unpleasant. Thus, if you look at the haloes left by the shots or the flame of the jet nozzles, you will see very sharp color transitions. You will not notice anything like that in the pictures rendered by other cards.

We suppose these transitions appear because GeForce4 Titanium GPUs use texture compression in 3DMark03 or transform the textures into the 16-bit format to reach higher performance.

Now we turn on post-processing.

Post-processing in “Battle of Proxycon” results in lower performance. That is, the better quality of the picture is not free-of-charge here, as in the first gaming test. Otherwise, the situation remains the same: GeForceFX 5800 Ultra is ahead in all resolutions, followed by RADEON 9700 PRO. RADEON 9500 PRO is the third. We can now see clearly the advantage of 128MB memory over 64MB: the 128MB variant of RADEON 9500 is faster by about 50%. This gap was much smaller without post-processing.

Now, anisotropic filtering is on…

Enabled anisotropic filtering forced one more graphics card, SiS Xabre600 to quit the test, because it doesn’t support this filtering method. GeForceFX 5800 Ultra is still in the lead, closely followed by RADEON 9700 PRO. The performance of both cards dropped by about 1.5 times as we turned on anisotropic filtering.

RADEON 9000 and 9100 are faster here than GeForce3 Ti200: ATI’s graphics chips perform anisotropic filtering more effectively. But we just can’t explain why GeForce3 Ti200 outruns GeForce4 Ti4200-8x! The newer GeForce4 Ti4200-8x boasts a more powerful core, works at higher frequencies and uses AGP 8x (instead of AGP 4x used by GeForce3 Ti200). So, the better results of GeForce3 Ti200 can only be explained by the use of lower anisotropy levels instead of 8x. Otherwise, GeForce3 Ti200 just can’t be faster than GeForce4 Ti4200-8x!

“Game 2 – Battle of Proxycon” uses about 87MB of graphics memory to store textures and vertexes. Let’s try to load the graphics memory more by turning on FSAA 4x.

And once again, GeForceFX 5800 Ultra is far ahead. In 1024x768 resolution it’s 1.8 times faster than RADEON 9700 PRO! RADEON 9500 PRO keeps its third place, followed by GeForce4 Ti4800.

RADEON 9000 worked unstable with FSAA 4x in this test as well as in “Game 1 Wings of Fury”. So it has zero in the diagram. Xabre 600 once again shows the scene in one half of the screen only, so we will not take its results into account:

Funny, isn’t it? :)

Now, the full load: FSAA 4x plus anisotropic filtering.

You could have guessed: GeForceFX 5800 Ultra is on top, RADEON 9700 PRO is the second, RADEON 9500 PRO is the third. The amount of graphics memory does matter here: compare the results of 128MB and 64MB RADEON 9500. Other results need no comments of ours.

Futuremark Company claims that “Battle of Proxycon” is not enough to analyze graphics card’s performance in DirectX8 applications. The next gaming test, “Troll’s Lair”, uses the same technologies as Game 2, but somewhat differs from it.