Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

The gaming engine of Star Wars uses OpenGL, involving vertex and pixel programs corresponding to DirectX8 shaders via special extensions. ATI RADEON 9200 works not like the other testing participants in this game: there is no halo effects around the bright light sources, and the armor of the main characters looks poor. If you need an example, please take a look at the screenshots from RADEON 9200 (top) and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 (bottom):

ATI RADEON 9200

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600

Now let’s check the actual performance results:

Here the NVIDIA based graphics cards are significantly ahead of the rivals. The biggest performance boost during overclocking was demonstrated by NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 LE, GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and ATI RADEON 9600.

When we enable full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering the overall picture remains almost the same. The “cut-down” RADEON 9600 SE is still falling behind RADEON 9600, but the results for GeForce FX 5600 XT appear more than twice as low as those of GeForce FX 5600.

RADEON 9200 uses super-sampling for FSAA implementation falls almost down to GeForce FX 5600 XT, while Ti4200-8x loses much less of its speed due to multi-sampling support.