Game 4 – Mother Nature

This test requires DirectX9 support from all participating graphics cards. It means that only five cards of the thirteen are going to take part in this test. They are RADEON 9700 PRO, RADEON 9500 PRO, RADEON 9500 with 128MB and 64MB memory, and GeForceFX 5800 Ultra.

NVIDIA may be proud: its GeForceFX 5800 Ultra wins over the four RADEONs quite successfully. GeForceFX 5800 Ultra again dashes far ahead of RADEON 9700 Pro. The third, fourth and fifth positions have also been distributed quite logically: RADEON 9500 PRO, RADEON 9500 128MB and RADEON 9500 64MB.

“Game 4 – Mother Nature” test uses 54MB of graphics memory for the vertex buffer, 50MB for textures and 9MB for the index buffer. So, the scene in the fourth gaming test may take up about 113MB of graphics memory. It’s 1.7 times more than 64MB RADEON 9500 can accommodate, and this card has to load additional data from the system memory via the AGP bus.

But we have no great difference in performance of the 64MB and 128MB versions of the card here as well as in other gaming tests where no post-processing, 4x FSAA or anisotropic filtering were used. It means that the advantage of additional 64MB of graphics memory is not crucial even in complex scenes with high amounts of textures if none of those functions is turned on. And it doesn’t even matter whether the scene uses DirectX7, or DirectX8 or DirectX9.

Now we enable post-processing.

Enabling post-processing in this hardest gaming test increases the gaps between all graphics cards in all resolutions, except 1600x1200. GeForceFX 5800 Ultra is again ahead of all, and the performance difference between it and RADEON 9700 PRO is especially evident in 1600x1200. Here only 128MB graphics cards manage to work, just like in 1280x1024. And the performance difference between RADEON 9500 128MB and RADEON 9700 PRO makes only 0.6 frames per second. In other words, the performance difference between these two graphics cards is not proportional and looks very unusual against the background of the previous tests results. But where does this huge performance drop on transition from 1280x1024 to 1600x1200 come from?

On the one hand, there is higher graphics memory workload in this resolution and the graphics cards have transfer the data from the local graphics memory along the AGP 8x bus. But as we have already learned from the previous tests (and especially from Game 4 - Mother Nature without post-processing and anisotropic filtering), the graphics card doesn’t slow down too much in this case: 128MB and 64MB RADEON 9500 show similar performance. On the other hand, with enabled post-processing this performance difference gets even more noticeable and becomes especially evident in 1024x768. Analyzing  the performance reduction because of the lack of local graphics memory, I dare suppose that in 1600x1200 RADEON 9500, RADEON 9500 Pro and RADEON 9700 PRO could work about 1.5-2 times slower than in 1280x1024 resolution, but this number would never be 2-3 times, by no means! The explanation that comes to mind is certain faults in ATI’s drivers, but this is only a supposition. We guess we can’t make far-going statements basing on results of a single 3DMark03 test.

Now we are passing over to the tests with enabled anisotropic filtering.

GeForceFX 5800 Ultra still holds its ground. The second position as usual belongs to RADEON 9700 PRO. The example of two RADEON 9500 versions with different amount of graphics memory onboard we can see that there is a very little gain derived from extra 64MB of graphics memory: only 0.5-1.2fps. The graphics cards anyway have to transfer the data via the AGP bus and they both suffer from the lack of local graphics memory. But 64MB is far not enough to work in 1600x1200 resolution with enabled anisotropic filtering, and this is a much graver limitation than those 0.5-1.2fps mentioned above.

The next step is enabled anti-aliasing.

64MB RADEON 9500 couldn’t chew up the test in this mode, which is not surprising at all keeping in mind the memory size required to run Game 4 – Mother Nature with 4x FSAA. Since in all the previous tests with anti-aliasing the 64MB RADEON 9500 worked OK, at least up to 1600x1200 resolution, we can conclude that 3DMark03 requires the graphics card to store not only the frame buffer in the local memory but also the vertex buffer. The fourth gaming test has a 54MB vertex buffer (compare to 6MB, 6MB and 19MB buffers by the three previous tests, respectively). So, no wonder that with enabled FSAA requiring bigger frame buffer, there is simply no room left in the 64MB graphics memory of RADEON 9500 to store all the data.

Well, it’s high time we ran the hardest test of all: Game 4 – Mother Nature with enabled FSAA 4x and anisotropic filtering at a time. Let’s see what will come out of it.

Even in this heaviest test, as usual, it is GeForceFX 5800 Ultra based graphics card that wins! RADEON 9700 PRO loses no more than 2.3fps, but never comes ahead.RADEON 9500 PRO and RADEON 9500 128MB split the third and the fourth places. The 64MB RADEON 9500 based card didn’t manage “Mother Nature” with both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering on.

Summing it up, we should acknowledge that “Game 4 – Mother Nature” demonstrated the superiority of graphics cards based on NVIDIA GeForceFX 5800 Ultra GPU in complex DirectX9 applications. This graphics card won all the tests. During the test session in Game 4 – Mother Nature we didn’t reveal any image artifacts by any of the 5 graphics cards tested. On the whole, “Mother Nature” is a questionable test. It uses an awfully complex scene that has more geometry in one frame than any modern game can boast. It also doesn’t use all DirectX9 instructions. So, we have just had a look at how well present-day graphics cards feel under such hard working conditions of tomorrow. Of thirteen cards that passed “Wings of Fury”, there are only five that were allowed to “Mother Nature” (the others just don’t support DirectX9). But even among these five cards, one couldn’t work with full-screen anti-aliasing (as it has only 64MB of graphics memory) and another – with anisotropic filtering. A sad picture, really.

From gaming tests we now turn to synthetic ones. They will help us to estimate the cards’ performance from the functional point of view.