Bombing Run: Colossus demo

Colossus level is rather large and grandeur. It also has loads of geometry details and high intensity of overdraw. But all graphics cards, except XGI Volari V8 Ultra, still managed to work well.

All the comments said about performance in the Unreal Tournament 2004 are effective here. Putting aside single-digit differences between the results of graphics cards built upon chips from different vendors, we have right to say that they are more or less close.

But there are some pretty unexpected things about results of NVIDIA’s graphics processors here. Pay attention how the GeForce FX 5900 falls behind the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra by about 25% in 1280x1024 resolution, a figure we did not see in previous test scenes. We cannot attribute this gap to extra 128MB of memory the 5950 Ultra has over 5900, as we do not see any serious improvements the RADEON 9800 XT has over the 128MB RADEON 9800 PRO. All we can suggest is that massive improvement comes from clock-speed increase of the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. Maybe additional 128MB play a role, but not a very important one.

We were surprised to see S3’s DeltaChrome S8 beating the RADEON 9600 PRO by even a small single-digit number.

The results in “eye-candy” mode are in line with expectations: ATI’s high-end VPUs are ahead competition, ATI’s mainstream VPUs are a bit slower than comparable rivals. The GeForce 5900 is seriously behind the RADEON 9800 PRO and even more behind the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.