X-bit labs

S3 DeltaChrome S8 Gets Nitro Acceleration: Review of the Revamped S8 (page 14)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 03/09/2004 | 02:56 AM ]

Gaming Performance

We have again updated the list of games to be used for graphics processors and VGA cards tests. Here it is for your reference:

First person 3D shooters:

• Return To Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory;
• Call of Duty;
• Unreal Tournament 2003;
• Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo;
• Halo: Combat Evolved;
• Tron 2.0;
• Highly Anticipated DX9 Game 1;
• Highly Anticipated DX9 Game 2;
• FarCry Demo.

Third person 3D shooters:

• Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell;
• Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness;
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time;
• Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne.

Simulators:

• IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles;
• X2: The Treat;
• F1 Challenge 99-2002.

Real-time strategies:

• C&C Generals: Zero Hour.

Semi-synthetic benchmarks:

• Final Fantasy XI Official Benchmark 2;
• Aquamark3.

Synthetic benchmarks:

• Futuremark 3DMark03 build 340.

We removed Star Trek 2: Elite Force game from the list and added a very popular first-person 3D shooter instead. This game is called Call of Duty and the action takes place during the WWII, just like in RTCW. Moreover, we also added the demo versions of Unreal Tournament 2004 and FarCry. You can read more about the first game in our article called Unreal Tournament 2004: The Kingdom of Massacre. As for FarCry, it is worth dwelling on now: even the demo version of this 3D shooter with the limited number of textures is very beautiful and rich in modern special effects.

Pixel shaders are everywhere in FarCry. In the very beginning of the demo level the player is surrounded by a very beautiful water surface with the highly realistic reflection of the surrounding environment. The game is very resource hungry and can use up the entire system potential even of a high-performance system like ours. It suits perfectly well for the evaluation of the contemporary graphics accelerators performance, especially since the games of the kind will become more and more numerous with the time.

Unfortunately, FarCry once again demonstrated how important it is to have hardware and game developers cooperating on a constant basis. Just take a look at the screenshots below:

As you see, by DeltaChrome all objects within sight are colored light-blue except those located at a distance from the viewer. We haven’t seen anything like that by RADEON or GeForce FX. The problem is evidently in the S3 Graphics’ drivers, and we hope they will eliminate it in the upcoming driver versions. As for all other games, we didn’t notice any visual problems there. The issues described in the previous S3 DeltaChrome S8 Review have been eliminated: now Unreal Tournament 2003, Tron 2.0 and F1 Challenge provide a crystal clear image without any artifacts.

Unfortunately, the new drivers again support only a very resource-hungry 2x super-sampling mode, which drops the performance down to an unacceptable level. Moreover, this anti-aliasing works only in resolutions below 1024x768 that is why there is only one single diagram for Eye Candy mode in each game, where you can see the results of 2x super-sampling and 8x anisotropic filtering. I don’t think I need to provide detailed comments to these diagrams, because the performance in every case was 2-2.5 times lower than in Pure Speed mode. In other words, it was so low that I don’t think it is of any practical value to you.