SiluroIQ and Graphics Max: Useless Tools

The CD with drivers includes two curious utilities called Graphics Max and SiluroIQ. The first of them is an overclocking tool, and the second is a system monitoring program. Frankly, they both fell short of our expectations. Graphics Max has a narrow frequency range for the GPU (375MHz) and average (875MHz) for the memory. SiluroIQ will not work at all, which is no surprise: the hero of our today’s review has no hardware monitoring capabilities. The CD also contains a modified version of InterVideo WinDVD player under the name of SiluroDVD.

The second disk coming with the card stores a demo version of “Soldier of Fortune II”, an “Earth Viewer” program (a kind of virtual globe) and a special version of “Window Blinds” that can change the looks of Windows XP. However, the latter utility works only with styles from NVIDIA and ABIT that are enclosed.

Overclocking and 2D Quality

Our ABIT Siluro FX 5600 Ultra DT card gave out 415/810MHz at overclocking, but I decided to benchmark it at 400/800MHz (the frequencies of the new revision of NV31). The 15/10MHz frequency difference is of no crucial matter. The quality of the screen image in 2D was good enough, although the text seemed a little blurred in 1600x1200@85. On the other hand, 2D quality largely depends on the display you use the graphics card with.

Testbed and Methods

The direct competitors to GeForce FX 5600 Ultra based cards are those that feature ATI’s RADEON 9600 PRO and a little out-dated, but still potent, RADEON 9500 PRO. We also include the results shown by NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 as a kind of reference-point.

The testbed was configured as follows:

• AMD Athlon XP 2600+ “Thoroughbred” (2.083GHz, 333MHz FSB) CPU;
• EPoX EP-8K3A+ mainboard;
• 512MB Corsair XMS3200 memory (2-2-2-5 1T, 333MHz);
• Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X (2MB buffer) HDD, 40GB;
• Creative SoundBlaster Live! 1024 audio card;
• OS: Microsoft Windows XP SP1;
• Drivers: VIA Hyperion 4-in-1 v.4.47, ATI Catalyst 3.5 (for RADEON-based cards), NVIDIA Detonator 44.03 (for GeForce FX 5600 Ultra).

The list of our benchmarks included:

• Futuremark 3DMark 2001SE Build 330;
• Futuremark 3DMark03;
• Codecult CodeCreatures Benchmark Pro v1.0;
• Unreal Tournament 2003 v2225, Antalus Flyby;
• Quake 3: Arena v1.32, Demo four;
• Return to Castle Wolfenstein v1.4, Demo checkpoint;
• Serious Sam: The Second Encounter v1.05, The Grand Catherdral;
• Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast  v1.04, Massasi Temple – Lightsaber Test;
• Splinter Cell v1.2b, 1_1_1Tbilisi Demo.

All the games ran with maximum graphics quality settings in three resolutions: 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. There were two work modes: “light” (without full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering) and “hard” (4x FSAA and 8x AF). To my regret, NVIDIA once again was caught at drivers “optimization”, this time in Splinter Cell. It turned out the graphics cards based on last-generation GPUs from NVIDIA and ATI Technologies couldn’t correctly enable full-screen antialiasing in this game. There appear artifacts, often in the way of light sources shining through solid walls. The companies took different approaches to this problem, although similarly unacceptable. ATI Technologies just ignored it and left things as they were. NVIDIA turned to its favorite hocus-pocus: modified the drivers so that full-screen antialiasing wouldn’t turn on when the user launches SplinterCell.exe. As usual, they “forgot” to tell the community about it and we have to make up for this now. Here are the visual treats you can enjoy by renaming SplinterCell.exe and running the game with enabled FSAA:

Some more:

Or even such:

Thus, we should acknowledge that Splinter Cell tests cannot be called correct, although GeForce FX shows a true-to-life performance hit in this game when FSAA is on. So, we recommend you use this benchmark to compare chips from one manufacturer (ATI against ATI or NVIDIA against NVIDIA). For the sake of truth I should note that there are some problems with light sources with ATI hardware as well when FSAA enabled. The artefacts are still not as dramatic as with NVIDIA hardware.

The introduction over, let’s see the benchmarking results.