Highly-Anticipated Next Generation DirectX 9.0 Game

The following test seems the most interesting, since it is a game of the next generation on a revolutionary engine, fully utilizing the capabilities of the DirectX 9.0 API. We benchmarked the cards using two demos, recorded by ourselves.

Much to our surprise, the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra is running faster than the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. Is it an error of some kind or something? Well, no. The game simply didn’t run in the DirectX 9.0 mode on the GeForce FX 5600, switching to the DirectX 8.1. The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra managed to run the game in the DirectX 9.0 mode… It should better not do it. The card doesn’t produce enough fps to play the game in the proper way even in 1024x768, not mentioning the higher resolutions. The much-hoped-for ForceWare driver couldn’t help the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra out of the mire. Moreover, it gave out a peculiar artifact: many object shadows looked like black rectangles, which we didn’t see when using the Detonator 45.23. Of course, this bug will surely be corrected in the future version of the ForceWare, but this is the fact: the new driver may bring artifacts into some games. Well, this game is not yet released, so its developers bear a part of the blame.

Meanwhile, the RADEON 9600 XT allows you to play in 1280x1024! However, if you are a hardcore gamer, I would recommend you to pay attention to high-end products like the RADEON 9800 XT and 9800 PRO first.

Splinter Cell

This game should be well known to you, as we have been using it in our tests for a while already.

Once again, let me remind you that the results shown by NVIDIA’s GPUs in the FSAA mode should not be considered correct. The new driver didn’t eliminate the problems. Take a look at this screenshot – the protagonist and the grid don’t cast the shadow to the wall. Compare this to the screenshot taken on the RADEON 9600 XT, which has it the right way. NVIDIA explained us that the issues with Splinter Cell resemble the problems there are with HALO, so, the FSAA mode cannot be easily enabled on NVIDIA’s GPUs (we had to rename Splinter Cell exe file to turn the FSAA on, otherwise the driver automatically disables the full-scene-antialiasing).

For the sake of truth I have to confess that even though there are a lot less issues with FSAA and ATI Technologies’ VPUs, the RADEON hardware also does not work with the game absolutely flawlessly when FSAA is enabled – we mentioned about this in our ABIT SILURO GeForce FX 5600 Ultra DT review earlier this year.

Alas, I say it once again that the new drivers from NVIDIA bring both higher performance and a number of visual artifacts. Hopefully, the software developers of the company will solve these problems soon.