Performance in Gaming Tests

We keep the same set of gaming tests, only now we use IL-2 Sturmovik: Aces and the P40_vs_Zero.ntrk track instead of IL-2: Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles. Besides that, we run IL-2 with the maximum quality settings and enabled pixel shaders. Interested to see what happened to our cards? There are some surprises…

We also use the more “real” F15-Low track instead of Aerobatic in Lock On. In Max Payne 2 we use a different scene, where the performance is not so badly affected by the CPU any more. Other tests and settings remained unchanged: we use the maximum graphics quality settings available.

Far Cry Demo

Far Cry is probably the most advanced game among all included into this review. Far Cry uses vertex and pixel DirectX 9 shaders and switches to DirectX 8 shaders when version 2.0 ones are not supported. The image quality doesn’t degenerate because of that. That’s why the results of the graphics cards on the RADEON 9200 and GeForce4 Ti4200 should be regarded outside of others because they don’t support DirectX 9 and work in an “easy” mode.

Well, there are no results of the RADEON 9200 in Far Cry Demo as this graphics cards behaves incorrectly in this test. You can see it in the screenshots (the RADEON 9200 is top, the GeForce4 Ti4200 is bottom).

ATI RADEON 9200

NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti4200

A portion of triangles in cliff models is not reproduced by the RADEON 9200 and the water surface has a terrific color that changes as the player moves.

So, the results follow:

Far Cry Demo uses extensively DirectX 9 pixel shaders, so the overall leadership of graphics processors from ATI shouldn’t be a surprise.

The results of the graphics card in this test are mostly determined by the speed of executing pixel shaders. That is, by the efficiency of the pixel processors and the clock rate of the chips. For example, the two cards on the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra chip with different memory types and frequencies show practically the same results, while the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra with ordinary DDR2 is faster than the board with GDDR3, because it has a higher GPU frequency and lower memory clock rate. Overclocking is most rewarding for the GeForce FX 5700 LE thanks to its doubled graphics processor clock rate.

The RADEON 9600 SE with its twice reduced memory bus and a lower memory frequency loses to the results of the RADEON 9600 very little, while the “cut-down” GeForce FX 5600 XT is slower than the “full-fledged” GeForce FX 5200.

The GeForce4 Ti4200-8x is exempt from executing DirectX 9 shaders and shows results on the same level with the GeForce FX 5700. Overclocking helps it to get even with the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra or RADEON 9600 PRO.

We didn’t test the graphics cards in Far Cry Demo enabling such heavy features as full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering because the cards would work incorrectly.