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Quake 3 Arena
will tell the story of OpenGL performance levels of each
card, with one of the most popular and widely exploited
game engines of all time. Doom3 is right around the
corner and it seems that in the not so distant future,
we'll be replacing all our Q3 benchmark efforts with Id's
latest gory shoot 'em up thriller. Until then, we'll
provide you numbers based on the latest Quake 3 point
release.
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Quake 3 Arena Time Demos |
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OpenGL and Plenty Old |
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At standard
settings, again it's a close race for both the Radeon 9800
Pro 256MB and the GFFX 5900 Ultra. However, the AA
and Aniso Filtering modes displayed here paint a very
different picture. Clearly, the GFFX 5900 Ultra has
a bandwidth advantage with 4X AA enabled. However,
turn on 8X AF and the frame rates take a nose dive,
allowing the Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB card to pass it by with
10 fps to spare.
And then we
see the Radeon 9800 card hit a bandwidth and fill rate
wall at 1600X1200 res, with 4X AA enabled, with or without
AF. The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra smokes the Radeon card
here by almost 30 fps at 4X AA and retains a small margin
lead on the R9800 Pro 256, even with 8X AF enabled.
What is impressive actually, is how little the R9800 Pro
256 drops off going from 4X AA to 4X AA with 8X AF.
While the 5900 UItra suffers roughly a 40 fps drop, the
Radeon 9800 Pro 256 drops only by about a 16 fps penalty.
This is more proof that NVIDIA needs to optimize their AF
performance as well, although their AF image quality is
clearly impeccable and every bit as good as the Radeon
9800 Pro.
Next Up - Unreal
Tournament 2003 and The Wrap-Up |