X-bit labs

Almost a Champion: ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT Gaming Performance Review (page 16)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 05/24/2007 | 03:39 PM ]

Rydermark

This benchmark makes its debut on our site. Rydermark was developed by the independent English company Candella Software with a specific purpose of demonstrating capabilities of modern graphics subsystems and evaluating their performance in new-generation games.

The benchmark is based on an engine developed for a future game. It supports Shader Model 3.0, 64-bit floating-point color representation, soft shadows, parallax occlusion mapping, realistic physics of liquids, and a lot of other features.

The test scene shows a race of speedboats through the canals of Venice, so the rendering of the water surface, which remains one of the most difficult tasks in computer graphics, is especially sophisticated. The benchmark displays results in abstract scores as well as in tangible frames-per-second.

To stress-test the modern graphics architectures from AMD/ATI and Nvidia we enabled 64x FSAA, 64-bit FP HDR and Parallax Occlusion Mapping.

The Radeon HD 2900 XT fails this round – the numbers are quite definite about that. Some problems with the driver for AMD’s new graphics card series may be the reason for the new card being slower than the Radeon X1950 XTX. Some problems in the benchmark itself may be another reason (Rydermark is currently beta 2, i.e. far from the final release).