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Let's look at some basic frame
rates with Id's Quake 3 Arena and various high resolution
time demo runs.
The VisionTek
GeForce4 Ti4400 is certainly within striking distance of the
Ti4600 reference board we used in this test. In
actuality you are looking at a 7 - 10% differential in
performance at stock clock speeds. The Radeon 8500
drops in behind the two GeForce4 cards here, at roughly 20%
slower than the Ti4400. However, it's price tag is
also significantly less. We'll discuss price points
later in more detail.
Anti-Aliasing
Tests:
When it comes to
anti-aliasing performance, fill rate and memory bandwidth
are critical to high frame rates. As such, the Ti4400
card drops back to approximately 12% slower than the Ti4600.
Regardless, at 1280X1024 resolution and 32 bit color with
maximum texture and geometry details, the VisionTek Ti4400
still responds with a very "playable" 54.7 fps. In
addition, you are not seeing a typo here, the 2X FSAA and 3X
FSAA scores for the Ti4600 and Ti4400 boards, are identical
with no performance penalty shown for running in 3X FSAA
mode.
Anisotropic
Filtering:
A byproduct of anti-aliasing
is slight texture blurring. Cleaning up all those jagged
edges and lines does come along with a small penalty in
overall scene pixel smoothing, which in turns also smoothes
out sharp, detailed textures. However, anisotropic
filtering does a marvelous job of refining texture detail
and improving overall image clarity. NVIDIA has three
settings in it's driver control panel that allow the user to
adjust for anisotropic filtering levels in OpenGL
applications. We tested in 4X mode which sets "32 tap"
anisotropic filtering on, with the OpenGL based Quake 3
engine.
Here the
VisionTek GeForce4 Ti4400 shows only a 9% differential
between its score and the Ti4600. At 70 frames per
second with 2X FSAA, even the tired Quake 3 engine looks
great in high res.
Serious Sam and Comanche 4 |
