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Before we dig
too deeply into the benchmarks, it's important to consider
image quality in our assessment of relative performance.
After all, if a graphics card can drive faster frame rates,
but does so at the expense of image quality and precision,
then we're not really comparing things fairly, are we?
So we set out to look at a couple of image quality
scenarios, taken from some game engines we used for
benchmarking and evaluation in this article. Below are
screen shots from Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory, a highly
advanced Quake 3 / OpenGL engine game, and AquaMark3, a
DirectX8 / DirectX9 benchmark, that is also based on real
game engine.
We took all of the following screen shots, on the ATi Radeon
9800 XT and the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra. We used
ATi's Catalyst 3.7 drivers and NVIDIA's Detonator 51.75
drivers for testing.
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Screenshots with Anisotropic Filtering,
Wolfenstein Enemy Territory & AquaMark3 |
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Crisp, clean and bring on the caffeine |
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First lets consider the
OpenGL based title, Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory.
Below you'll see images from identical areas and positions
in a map. As you can see, in both Anti-Aliasing and
Anisotropic Filtering tests, ATi's and NVIDIA's quality are
very comparable, almost identical actually. It seems
as though, at least for Q3 engine based games, NVIDIA has
their image quality in check and ATi has upheld there
excellent rendering output as well. Even the
Anti-Aliasing, which has been NVIDIA's obvious downfall, in
our opinion lately, looks really tight on the NV35 board we
tested.
ATi 8X AF
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NV 8X AF
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ATi 4X AA - 8X AF
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NV 4X AA - 8X AF
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Wolfenstein Enemy
Territory - OpenGL Based Gaming
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ATi 4X AA - 8X AF
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NV 4X AA - 8X AF
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AquaMark3 - DX8 and
DX9 Based Gaming |
Then there are the DirectX
driven shots, with AquaMark3, where NVIDIA's card definitely
paints a different picture. There is definitely a
slight loss of precision and image quality in both AA and
Aniso Filtering rendered output. If you look at the
top of the nearby silos and the edges of the building off in
the distance, you can see that the NVIDIA rendered shot is
without question a bit more jagged at the edge lines.
Also, NVIDIA's image seems to not be as vivid or as sharp as
the ATi shot. We've actually seen better output from
NVIDIA cards, in DX8 game engines like Comanche and Unreal
Tournament, but still AA and Aniso image quality doesn't
seem quite up to par with ATi's at the moment. For
additional AA and Aniso comparisons, between the Radeon 9800
and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 series cards in AquaMark3, you
can look
here at our recent AquaMark3 - GFFX 5900U Vrs. R9800
Pro article.
Regardless, keep this in mind
while you are perusing our benchmark numbers in the DirectX
benchmarks we'll have for you in the following pages.
NVIDIA's cards currently just aren't doing the work that an
ATi card is, in DX8/9 gaming with image quality settings
turned up. NVIDIA has closed the gap somewhat, with
their recently released Detonator 51.75 drivers.
However, they're not quite where they need to be just yet.
More on this later.
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HotHardware's Test Setup |
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It's
the Top of the Line! At Least For Now |
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Intel
Pentium 4 3GHz w/ HyperThreading
DFI
LANParty Pro875 - Intel i875 Chipset Based Motherboard
1G Kingston HyperX PC3500 DDR DRAM
Maxtor Diamond
Max Plus 9 80Gig SATA Hard Drive
52X CD-RW
Drive
Windows XP
Professional with SP1
DirectX 9.0b
Intel Chipset
Drivers Version
v5.0.2.1003
ATi
Radeon 9800 XT 256MB
ATi Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB
ATi Radeon 9800 Pro
ATi Catalyst
Drivers - Version 3.7
NVIDIA
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
Detonator
Drivers - Version 51.75
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Performance Comparisons
With AquaMark3 |
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DX8
and DX9 Benchmarks |
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At the moment,
we feel AquaMark3 is fairly indicative of DirectX gaming
performance metrics between the Radeon 9800 XT and GeForce
FX 5900 Ultra, with one caveat. NVIDIA has been known
to be taking aggressive measure to optimize Anisotropic
Filtering performance in DirectX applications, like Unreal
Tournament for example. It's interesting to see how
the 9800 XT is neck and neck with the 5900 Ultra, at default
settings and beats the 5900 Ultra with AA enabled.
Yet, when we have 8X Aniso Filtering enabled, the race is a
lot closer. Why is this? Historically, with
previous version drivers, we've seen exactly the opposite,
with the performance advantage going to ATi hands down.
Again, if you take a look at the image quality shots for
AquaMark3 above, here in this page, you'll notice that the
ATi images do look significantly better, so take that into
consideration when you look at these scores. However,
we also took a look at image quality in Comanche 4
(benchmarks in the pages ahead) a DX8 based title, and saw
no loss of image quality that we could easily discern.
Unreal Tournament 2003 And Splinter Cell Testing
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