RV360 vs. NV36: Gaming Benchmarks

This time we had a thorough overhaul of our set of benchmarks. All obsolete games were excluded and replaced with new ones that are intended for modern GPUs. Here’s the full list of the applications we are going to use:

• Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
• Unreal Tournament 2003 v2225
• Star Trek: Elite Force 2
• Halo
• Tron 2.0
• Splinter Cell
• F1 Challenge 99-02
• Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness
• X2 - The Threat Rolling demo
• Highly-Anticipated Next-Generation DirectX 9.0 Game
• Futuremark 3DMark03
• Aquamark 3

We ran our own demos in every game, save for Unreal Tournament 2003 and Splinter Cell, to avoid the “optimizations”. The graphics quality settings were at maximum in every game. There are two work modes: “pure speed” and full-screen anti-aliasing (FSAA) 4x plus anisotropic filtering (AF) 8x. For the sake of comparison, we also include the results of the ATI RADEON 9800 PRO.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

This game is a multiplayer 3D-shooter, running on the redesigned engine from the original RTCW, which in its turn is the redesigned engine from Quake 3: Arena. The Enemy Territory add-on provides a higher-quality graphics than the original game, thus demanding more from the graphics card.

Recalling NVIDIA’s GPU were fast in Quake 3: Arena, it is no wonder they show an excellent performance in this test, especially in high resolutions. The RADEON 9600 XT is doing quite fine, too. It only loses 1600x1200 resolution to the competitor, “thanks” to the slower memory.

Star Trek: Elite Force 2

Star Trek: Elite Force 2 also has the Quake 3 engine deep under its skin.

The RADEON 9600 PRO and 9600 XT are both running close to each other, while the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra is considerably faster than the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra in the FSAA+AF mode. The GeForce GPUs are outperforming the RADEON 9800 PRO even in the “pure speed” mode!

Seems like NVIDIA is all right? Well, don’t forget that the Quake 3: Arena engine has lived its term. It’s not long until it is never used anymore, being replaced with other, more sophisticated engines.