Performance: Gaming Tests

Quake3 Arena

As usual, let’s start with Quake3 Arena. Settings look as follows: 32-bit texture color and frame-buffer depths, maximum amount of textures and objects, tri-linear filtering is on, texture compression is off.

All graphics cards were tested in default modes. In other words, NVIDIA based graphics cards were tested in Quality mode (former Balanced mode), and ATI based cards – in Balanced mode.

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra proved just excellent here, having outperformed GeForce4 Ti4200-8x, and in 800x600 and 1024x768 it even surpassed ATI RADEON 9500 Pro.

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra reference graphics card fell behind GeForce FX 5600 Ultra more than we had expected, even taking into account the difference in the cards working frequencies. The reason for this severe lag is the fact that NV34 doesn’t support the internal organization with 4 pixel pipelines and 1 TMU per pipeline.

Nevertheless, GeForce FX 5200 Ultra managed to easily outpace GeForce4 MX440-8x as well as the ATI RADEON 9000 Pro competitor. A slower version of NVIDIA NV34 based solution from Albatron has no evident advantage over these solutions and performs almost as fast as GeForce4 MX440-8x and RADEON 9000 Pro.

Maximum resolution supported by ATI RADEON 9000 Pro in SMOOTHVISION 4x Quality mode (which is exactly the mode we tested this graphics card in) makes 1024x768. That is why we do not see any results of ATI RADEON 9000 pro in higher resolutions. Anyway, even in available modes the card failed to compete on equal terms with the other testing participants: unlike other chips, RADEON 9000 Pro supports only slow outdated supersampling algorithm.

NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200-8x and GeForce4 MX440-8x graphics cards with 43.45 driver version displayed just an empty screen when we enabled full-screen anti-aliasing in 1600x1200. That is why these results are also not on the diagram.

As for everything else, there were no problems, and new NVIDIA chips performed excellently well. The fastest NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, easily defeated GeForce4 Ti4200-8x and fell just a tiny bit behind ATI RADEON 9500 Pro, while the youngest member of the family, GeForce FX 5200 Ultra, got ahead of GeForce4 MX440-8x in no time.

But you shouldn’t forget that only GeForce FX 5600 Ultra used “true” 4x anti-aliasing. All other NVIDIA chips used an optimization with trembling polygon edges, described above.

For ATI RADEON 9500 Pro we used Performance anisotropic filtering mode, and for NVIDIA chips – Quality mode (formerly known as Balanced, so there are no discrepancies in the image quality). With these particular settings NVIDIA GeForce FX chips and ATI RADEON 9500 Pro do not use true tri-linear filtering together with anisotropic filtering.

As a result, new GeForce FX chips managed to speed up quite a bit. And though NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200/5200 Ultra didn’t beat GeForce4 Ti4200-8x, then GeForce FX 5600 Ultra left the latter quite far behind.

The leader here remains ATI RADEON 9500 Pro, which owes its victory to very fast anisotropic filtering algorithms in Performance mode.

NVIDIA GeForce4 MX440-8x solution didn’t participate in this benchmark: the maximum anisotropy level supported by GeForce4 MX440-8x chip is equal to 2.

In the heaviest mode the leadership of ATI RADEON 9500 pro remains unchanged.

The new NVIDIA GeForce FX chips perform quite well here, and if in 800x600 resolution the fastest newcomer, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, is just a little ahead of GeForce4 Ti4200-8x, then in 1280x1024 even GeForce FX 5200 has almost managed to beat the latter.