Performance in Simulators

IL-2 Sturmovik: Aces in the Sky

The last version of the popular flight simulator IL-2 Sturmovik is a very demanding game, requiring a high pixel shader performance and a high fill rate from the graphics card. The GeForce 6800 Ultra can boast a high fill rate, while the ASUS AX800 XT works faster with the shaders. NVIDIA’s top-end card is ahead of the ASUS in this test, but the gap is negligible. When the ASUS is overclocked, there’s even no gap at all.

Graphics cards with GPUs from ATI usually feel at their ease at eye candy settings (when full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are enabled) thanks to their quick operation with the graphics memory, but we’ve got quite another picture this time: all the members of the GeForce 6800, except the 12-pipelined model, run this game much faster than the ASUS AX800 XT. We are not really sure why this happens; probably ATI’s OpenGL driver is subject to blame.