X-bit labs

ATI RADEON 9600 XT vs. NVIDIA GeForce FX5700 Ultra (page 17)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 11/03/2003 | 10:33 PM ]

Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness

This game looks much similar to Splinter Cell, but offers somewhat more flexible graphics settings. We set the game up to use 32-bit textures only, and disabled shadows. The shadows use 2.0 shaders and wouldn’t work with the GeForce FX cards.

We have got used to this already. The RADEON 9600 XT puts another victory on record. The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra is even no match to the RADEON 9600 PRO in this test. The GeForce FX 5600 Ultra looks a relic of days long past: its 21fps in 1024x768 is not what we expect from a modern mass graphics card. When FSAA was enabled, the game wouldn’t run on the GeForce FX at all in resolutions higher than 1024x768. There were no error messages: the display just went black to reveal the Desktop in a second. One more minus into the NVIDIA driver’s piggy-bank.

F1 Challenge 99-02

This is one of the most advanced Formula 1simulators. If you are a fan of this sport, you will have a lot of fun playing the game. We are more interested, however, how well this game suits for our testing needs. One guy from our labs, being much into Formula 1, drove a full lap under bad weather conditions. The record was then used for testing with the help of the FRAPS utility.

The game was rather strange when running on the ATI VPUs: the number of fps has never grown above 45, notwithstanding the disabled VSync. This is the reason for the relatively low results shown by the RADEON 9800 PRO. The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra had a glorious performance here. When we enabled FSAA and AF, the situation changed: the cards on the ATI chips left the competitors behind.