X-bit labs

Winter-Spring 2004: Graphics Cards on Top Graphics Processors and Their Low-Cost Versions – Overclocker’s Best Choice (page 16)

Category: Video

by Tim Tscheblockov

[ 03/16/2004 | 05:22 PM ]

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

The game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic came from XBOX RPG platform and boasts a graphics engine of an excellent Action game. The gaming engine works in OpenGL and used special extensions for vertex and pixel tools similar to DirectX8 pixel and vertex shaders. The graphics cards were tested in two modes in this game: without the full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering and with these functions forced in the drivers.

The fillrate and the graphics memory bus bandwidth are the No. 1 determinatives for the graphics cards results in this gaming application.

For instance, the overclocked RADEON 9800 PRO boasts a slightly higher core clock frequency than RADEON 9800 XT and in 1024x768 and 1280x1024 resolutions it outperforms the rival. However, as the resolution grows, the dependence on the memory performance increases and in 1600x1200 the results of RADEON 9800 XT and RADEON 9800 PRO with slightly lower frequency of the overclocked graphics memory level out.

The same way, RADEON 9800 SE with 128bit memory bus yields to RADEON 9800 SE with 256bit memory bus despite the higher working frequencies of the former. And the higher grows the resolution, the bigger turns the gap between the competitors.

RADEON 9600 XT outperforms the nominal RADEON 9800 SE even without any overclocking. However, when we modify the SE cards, 9600 is no longer able to compete with them even after overclocking.

The non-overclocked NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 and 5900 XT show almost similar results and when overclocked, GeForce FX 5900 catches up with GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. The graphics card based on GeForce FX 5900 XT, which didn’t manage to jump sky-high even after overclocking is slightly behind GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.

The mainstream GeForce FX 5700 Ultra easily outpaced RADEON 9600 XT and got really close to GeForce FX 5900 XT after successful overclocking.

Enabled full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering changed the situation on the diagrams a little bit and aggravated the state of things for the slowest testing participants: RADEON 9800 SE based graphics cards working at nominal frequencies appeared dramatically low. Even after the modifications and overclocking these graphics cards are considerably behind the overclocked GeForce FX 5900/5900 XT, as the latter two solutions boast faster graphics memory.