X-bit labs

S3 DeltaChrome S8 Gets Nitro Acceleration: Review of the Revamped S8 (page 15)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

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

Performance in First Person 3D Shooters

Return To Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

S3 DeltaChrome S8 Nitro falls behind all the rivals despite its 8-pipeline architecture. It is the raw OpenGL drivers that cause this failure. NVIDIA GeForce FX is ahead of all, as usual, as its OpenGL driver is the best today. The results of Eye candy testing mode are not provided as S3 OpenGL driver doesn’t support FSAA.

Call of Duty

Call of Duty looks very similar to RTCW, however, in fact the differences are tremendous. In particular, the game has pixel shaders. The level with a Nazi military ship suits very well for testing purposes, because there you can see not only nice geometry but also water surface created with pixel shaders. It is exactly these pixel shaders that determine RADEON’s victory over NVIDIA GeForce FX, while the overall complexity of the environment caused a dramatic failure of S3 DeltaChrome S8 Nitro. Higher working frequencies allow the new S3 solution to outperform its predecessor, but you can actually see it only in high resolutions. The results obtained in FSAA+AF mode are not provided for the same reason as in case of RTCW: Enemy territory.