Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour

The graphics engine of this strategy game loads the graphics cards in real time quite heavily, and uses DirectX8 pixel and vertex shaders.

The results of the fastest cards in this test in 1024x768 appeared limited by the CPU speed, although ATI based cards still turned out a little bit faster: well, it looks like ATI drivers send fewer calculations to the CPU.

When we moved to 1280x1024 resolution, the results appeared less CPU dependent. And the performance difference between the fastest cards again balanced towards ATI. However, as soon as we enabled full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, the leadership got overtaken by NVIDIA, and GeForce FX 5700 Ultra based cards successfully outperformed ATI RADEON 9600 XT, while GeForce FX 5700 defeated RADEON 9600.

The old buddy RADEON 9200 with a fully-fledged 128bit memory bus outperforms a more up-to-date RADEON 9600 SE featuring a 64bit memory bus only. But when FSAA and AF are enabled, RADEON 9200 rolls back to the very last position in the list.

NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4200-8x runs as fast as GeForce FX 5700, but in heavy work modes it also falls back to the level of GeForce FX 5700 LE.