How We
Configured Our Test System:
To help fully explain the scores we have listed in the
following benchmarks, we felt it was necessary to first explain
how this system was set up.
We tested on an i875P "Canterwood" based MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R motherboard,
powered by an Intel Pentium 4 3.0CGHz CPU (800MHz System
Bus). The first
thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the
BIOS and loaded the "High Performance Defaults". Then we
set the memory to operate at 200MHz (Dual DDR400) with the
CAS Latency and other memory timings set by the SPD and the
AGP aperture size set to 256MB. The hard drive was then
formatted, and Windows XP Professional with SP1 was
installed. When the installation was complete, we installed
the Intel chipset drivers and then hit the Windows Update
site to download and install all of the available updates,
with the exception of the items related to Windows
Messenger. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers
for the rest of our components and Windows Messenger was
disabled and removed from the system. Auto-Updating and
System Restore were disabled, the hard drive was
de-fragmented, and a 768MB permanent page file was created.
Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best
performance", installed all of the benchmarking software and
ran all of the tests. All of the benchmarking was done with
ATi's and NVIDIA's drivers configured for maximum visual
quality. ATi's "Quality" anti-aliasing and Anisotropic
filtering methods were employed throughout our testing,
while the Performance slider available on NVIDIA's
"Performance and Quality" driver tab was set to "Quality".
For the "4X AA + Aniso" tests listed in our graphs, we
enabled 4X AA and 8X Anisotropic filtering in both NVIDIA's
and ATi's driver panels.
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HotHardware's Test Setup |
A
powerful match up of brains and brawn |
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Performance Comparisons
With AquaMark3 |
DX8
and DX9 Benchmarks |
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Aquamark 3 comes to us by the way of
Massive Development,
and is the first of our tests to be based on a real game
engine. Massive's release of the game Aquanox in
1999 was panned by critics, yet was one of the first to
implement DX8 shaders, which led to the creation of
Aquamark 2, another widely used benchmark.
Since the Aquamark benchmarks are based on a real gaming
environment, they must support old and new cards alike. Thus, Aquamark 3
utilizes not only DirectX 9 shaders, but DirectX 8 and 7
as well. We ran this benchmark at 1024x768 and at
1600x1200 with no anti-aliasing, then again with 4 and 6
samples, and one last time with 4 AA samples but with 8x
Anisotropic Filtering enabled in the drivers. |
The GeForce FX 5950 Ultra may have taken the top spot in
each of the tests, but that should be expected at the price
it demands. The other three cards, however, are all
similarly priced, give or take 10% or so. eVGA's GeForce FX
5900SE easily leads the other two cards, which are more or
less equals here. At 1024x768 with no AA applied, we
see roughly a 20% difference in performance between the
5900SE and the other two, which only increases up to 33% at
1600x1200. Only at 6XAA do we see the 5900SE fall
behind the competition, although it still manages to keep
close behind the more powerful 5950 Ultra.
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Benchmarks
With Halo |
Finally on the PC, Where it Belongs |
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For many gamers out
there, the release of Halo marked the end of a long wait,
since it was originally released as an Xbox exclusive a
few years back. No additional patches or tweaks
are needed to use this game's built-in benchmarking
utility, as Gearbox has included
all of the information needed in their Readme files.
The benchmark runs through four of the cut scenes from
the game, after which the average frame rate is
displayed. We ran it twice, once at 1024x768 and again at
1280x1024.
Anti-aliasing doesn't
work properly with this game at the moment, so all of
the tests below were run with anti-aliasing disabled. |
Anti-aliasing
doesn't work with Halo just yet, so we stuck with
raw numbers at two common resolutions. The GeForce FX 5700 Ultra and ATi
Radeon 9600 XT are in a dead heat, but the 5900 SE steamrolls
on. The 5900 SE averaged a frame rate of 45 frames per
second at 1024x768, 13 frames more than the other two cards,
a 40% advantage. Considering
the fact that the 9600 XT and 5700 Ultra were released only
two months ago, that's quite an increase in performance
while maintaining the same price point.
Unreal Tournament 2003 & Splinter Cell Testing
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