IL-2 Sturmovik: Aces

During the tests in an updated IL-2 game version we used maximum graphics quality settings, including “Advanced” landscape level of detail, when pixel shaders are used for water surfaces.

The graphics cards participating in our today’s test session differ by the implementation of pixel shaders support, so that IL-2 determines the graphics cards functionality and hence uses different shader sets for different cards. It turned out that there are three sets like that: the first set for GeForce 4 Ti4200, which supports maximum version 1.3 shaders; the second set is for RADEON 9200 with version 1.4 shaders support, and the third set for graphics cards supporting versions 2.0 hardware shaders. The differences in image quality are visible with a naked eye in this case. Below you can see three screenshots taken from an actual benchmark track: P40_vs_Zero.ntrk. The top one belongs to NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4200-8x, the middle one – to ATI RADEON 9200, and the bottom one – to NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600:

NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4200-8x

ATI RADEON 9200

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600

It seems to me that the worst sea surface and coast line quality was provided by NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4200-8x, and the best – by DirectX9 compatible graphics cards. But again, this is my subjective opinion.

Of course, the results of the graphics cards using different shaders for sea and coastline cannot be compared directly, therefore we will make our verdict about the testing participants performance separately for DirectX9 compatible cards, NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4200-8x and ATI RADEON 9200:

NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4200-8x uses its own set of pixel shaders and outperforms all other graphics cards with a huge gap, until anisotropic filtering and full-screen anti-aliasing are enabled. In this case Ti4200-8x lets NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and ATI RADEON 9600 XT/9600 PRO take the lead.

ATI RADEON 9200 uses a different shader set and appears between RADEON 9600 and RADEON 9600 PRO, but when FSAA and AF are enabled, it falls behind all the testing participants because of the super-sampling technology it uses. It only manages to beat GeForce FX 5600 XT and GeForce FX 5200.

Among DirectX9 compatible graphics cards ATI based solutions appear slightly ahead. The results of this benchmark are mostly determined by the pixel shader performance and fillrate, that is why the biggest performance boost was demonstrated by those cards, which graphics processors overclocked best of all. They are NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 LE and ATI RADEON 9600. With enabled full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering the memory bus workload grows up a lot that is why the graphics cards with narrower memory bus fell significantly behind their fully-fledged analogs.