Performance: OpenGL Games

Among OpenGL applications we count those that use Quake3 engine. They are: Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast and Quake3 Arena. Besides, we used Serious Sam: The Second Encounter that supports both: OpenGL and Direct3D API.

Quake 3 Arena: Demo Four

The good old RADEON 8500 wins the test without anisotropic filtering and full-screen anti-aliasing. No wonder it did with its two rendering pipelines and higher fillrate. RADEON 9200 is second from behind, because of its slower-clocked memory. GeForce4 MX440 loses just a little to RADEON 9200: the efficient OpenGL driver from NVIDIA helps the old architecture of the chip run rather fast.

Anisotropic filtering brings some changes into the ranks: GeForce4 MX440 takes the third place as it has more efficient 2x FSAA algorithms and low anisotropy level – 2x.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Demo checkpoint

This game has more complex and nicer-looking graphics and thus puts higher workload onto the graphics card. Here are the results:

There are no great changes in the picture: RADEON 8500 remains on top, while RADEON 9200 defeated GeForce4 MX440 only in the first test and only in 1024x768 resolution. Well, we can only admit that NVIDIA programmers did a great job on the OpenGL driver, which was developed together with the software guys from Silicon Graphics, the founder of this standard.