X-bit labs

S3 DeltaChrome S8 Gets Nitro Acceleration: Review of the Revamped S8 (page 19)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

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

Highly Anticipated DX9 Game 1

In the next generation games we will not run the tests in only two records, because the third record is a bit excessive, I suppose. Having run the tests in the third record, I saw that it doesn’t reveal anything new in the performance picture.

Next generation games will be very resource hungry. Most users know it already. NV3x architecture is not very well suited for Next Generation DirectX 9.0 Game, which we have already discussed in detail in our article. And the drivers, which were promised to improve the DirectX 9.0 performance in this and a few other applications are not available yet. S3 DeltaChrome S8 Nitro does its best to work in DerctX 9 mode and… it succeeds! It is not as successful as ATI based graphics cards, but it easily outperforms GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, which can hardly reach 30fps in the lowest screen resolution. GeForce FX 5600 Ultra, which could work in this game only with the DirectX 8 rendering mode enabled shows better numeric results but sacrifices a lot of its image quality for that.

In Under Two test the situation is just the same: S3 DeltaChrome S8 Nitro outperforms GeForce FX 5700 Ultra but falls behind all other testing participants.