X-bit labs

ASUS V9999 Gamer Edition Graphics Card Review (page 6)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 10/19/2004 | 12:41 PM ]

Doom III

As we have anticipated, the newcomer performs excellently in Doom 3 in contrast to the RADEON X800 PRO. This is no surprise considering the unique mutual understanding between the NV4x architecture and id Software’s game engine, while ATI’s OpenGL driver from the Catalyst suite is rather outdated already.

The gap between the ASUS V9999 Gamer Edition and the RADEON X800 PRO is smaller in the eye candy mode (with FSAA and AF enabled), but the ASUS maintains its leadership benefiting from the UltraShadow II technology and other specifics of NVIDIA’s new-generation graphics architecture. The highest efficiency of working with the graphics memory helps the RADEON X800 here as it only loses 2-4fps to the ASUS in high resolutions. In 1600x1200 resolution with High Quality graphics quality settings and enabled FSAA and AF, GeForce 6800 demonstrated less than 1fps performance because it lacked video memory tremendously that is why we didn’t show the results for this resolution on the diagrams. It is pretty surprising but GeForce 6600 GT worked just fine in these conditions, despite the same amount of onboard graphics memory. This issue is most likely to be connected with the architectural differences between the AGP and PCI Express platforms.

The graphics cards perform overall faster on this level, as it is intended for multiplayer, is simple and without monsters. The cards with NVIDIA’s new-generation architecture show their best here, anyway. The ASUS V9999 Gamer Edition is just a little slower than the GeForce 6800 GT.

When full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are enabled simultaneously, the ASUS V9999 Gamer Edition is ahead still. Due to the simplicity of the level, the RADEON X800 PRO can’t close the gap as it did in the eye candy mode on the Hellhole map.