Game 3 – Troll’s Lair

So, at first we run the test with tri-linear filtering turned on.

Unlike the “Battle of Proxycon”, GeForceFX 5800 Ultra has smaller advantage over RADEON 9700 PRO here. They fight for every fps! :)

The graphics cards based on RADEON 9500 PRO and 9500 graphics chips feel more confident here than in the previous test. We can see it in 800x600 resolution, where the junior DirectX9-compatible card (64MB RADEON 9500) is 1.5 times faster than GeForce4 Ti4800, the most powerful GPU in the GeForce4 family. In high resolutions the gap in cards’ performances becomes smaller, but their positions in the race remain unchanged. RADEON 9000 outperforms RADEON 9100 in “Troll’s Lair”, which is not at all surprising, because the third gaming test is similar to the second test and also uses ver.1.4 pixel shaders, which are performed much faster by RADEON 9000.

Xabre 600 produces the same artifacts as in the previous gaming test here. So we don’t even take into account its results, especially since they are anyway very low. If we had a real PC game instead of “Troll’s Lair”, you wouldn’t be able to play it on Xabre 600…

We turn on post-processing in the next round of testing.

Post-processing brings no changes into the leading group: GeForceFX 5800 Ultra is the first, followed by RADEON 9700 PRO and RADEON 9500 PRO.

But now that the graphics memory workload has become considerably higher we can see how big is the performance difference between the 64MB version and 128MB version of the RADEON 9500 based graphics card. Of course, 64MB of graphics memory seems too little for this test, therefore 64MB RADEON 9500 loses not only to its 128MB mate, but also to GeForce4 Ti4600 and 4800 (in resolutions over 800x600) and also to GeForce4 Ti4200-8x (in resolutions over 1280x1024).

The influence of anisotropic filtering comes next.

The performance difference between GeForceFX 5800 Ultra and RADEON 9700 PRO remains pretty small in this test, but GeForceFX 5800 Ultra still doesn’t give up its leadership. RADEON 9500 PRO graphics card occupies the third place being just a step behind RADEON 9700 PRO.

Curiously enough, GeForce3 Ti200 catches up with GeForce4 Ti4200-8x in higher resolutions. In 1600x1200 the two cards show similar performance, notwithstanding differences in their frequencies as well as in graphics chip architecture. Of course, it doesn’t mean that GeForce3 Ti200 can match GeForce4 Ti4200-8x in modern games. There must be something wrong with anisotropic filtering implementation in Ti200 as we have already mentioned above.

Now let’s pass over to the tests with enabled anti-aliasing.

With 4x anti-aliasing on, ATI’s graphics solutions suffer a bigger performance drop than NVIDIA’s GPUs. As a result, the gap between GeForceFX 5800 Ultra and RADEON 9700 PRO becomes wider, while the one between RADEON 9500 and GeForce4 Ti4800 – narrower. As a result, the third and the fourth positions are occupied by RADEON 9500 PRO and RADEON 9500 128MB respectively, while the fifth position belongs to GeForce4 Ti4800, which defeats 64MB RADEON 9500 and catches up with 128MB RADEON 9500 in high resolutions.

Xabre 600 beats GeForce3 Ti200 in 800x600 resolution, but as this graphics chip outputs the picture only onto one half of the screen, we get every right to divide its results by two as well :).

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

Overall, the results are similar to what we saw in “Battle of Proxycon” with enabled anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing. The leaders are the same: GeForceFX 5800 Ultra is the first in all resolutions, RADEON 9700 PRO and 9500 PRO are the second and the third correspondingly. The graphics cards based on GeForce4 Titanium chips can compete here only with RADEON 9100 and RADEON 9000. And if we take into account that the performance difference between GeForce3 Ti200 and RADEON 9500 PRO is only 2-3 fps and the performance of RADEON 9500 PRO varies from 3.1 to 9.3fps in different resolutions, then the further discussion of graphics cards performance will simply lose sense. The speeds are too low to be compared.

Well, here we would like to finish with DirectX8 Game 2 and Game 3 tests and will pass to the last gaming test aka Game 4 – Mother Nature.

Table of contents: Testbed Configuration Testing Methodology Performance     Game 1 – Wings of Fury     Game 2 – Battle of Proxycon     Game 3 – Troll’s Lair     Game 4 – Mother Nature     CPU Tests     FillRate     Vertex Shader     Pixel Shader 2.0     RagTroll Conclusion