Performance: Direct3D Games

We have two games using DirectX: Unreal Tournament 2003 and Splinter Cell. Both are quite new and load any graphics solution quite tangibly taking up all its resources.

Unreal Tournament 2003 v.2225, Antalus Flyby

Once again, RADEON 9200 lacks fast memory: it only slightly defeats GeForce4 MX440 at low resolutions with FSAA and AA. The amount of memory – 128MB – is of less importance here than its working frequency.

RADEON 8500 is invincible thanks to its two rendering pipelines.

Splinter Cell v.1.2b, 1_1_1Tbilisi Demo

This game uses a modified engine from UT 2003, but it is even hungrier for graphics chip power than Unreal Tournament 2003. Here are the results:

Splinter Cell is harder than UT 2003, being a stress for any modern graphics card, especially the value ones. GeForce4 MX440 wins the lowest resolution with anisotropy. In all the other modes, it takes its proper place: at the bottom of the line. Its old architecture simply cannot handle such workloads. We should admit, though, that none of the participating graphics cards showed any acceptable playability.

Due to some problems with the drivers, RADEON 9000 PRO and 8500 couldn’t turn on FSAA and anisotropic filtering in 1280x1024 resolution.