Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup - Part 2: High End Shootout
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 7, 2003 5:30 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
GunMetal IQ
GunMetal is a game somewhat in the tradition of Robotech (giant robots that can turn into planes). This is a DX9 game that uses VS2.0, but only PS1.1 (PS2.0 is one of the biggest advantages of DX9 and isn't employed here). Yeti studios was kind enough to provide the world with a benchmark featuring 2 different scenarios, both of which we used for this article.
One of the more interesting features of this benchmark is that its impossible to turn off anisotropic filtering and antialiasing must be set at 2x or higher. The argument is that these effects are becoming necessary for higher image quality in games and playing without them will become a thing of the past in the future. In fact, there are quite a few next generation games that are not compatible with driver AA settings (either because they implement their own AA, or they don't do AA at all). Apparently, NVIDIA has known issues with this game, but after going through it plenty of times we really didn't notice anything going wrong. Take a look:
NVIDIA 45.23
NVIDIA 52.14
ATI Catalyst 3.7
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Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Wasn't Anand allowed to use ShaderMark v2.0 for det. the pixel shader performace?Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
lol read this article take me a 1/2 hour. this article is great but it can be improvedAnonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
why anand didnt review bf1942 :(Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
why is anand bashing Tomb raiderand whats up with PS 2.0 graph
why not just post the fps, makes it seem
like nvidia is beating Ati. Also why are beta drivers being tested with nvidia. Should have used
cat 3.8 for Radeon.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
im still waiting that a site post a review for an 9600 XTPete - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Overall, a good read. Thanks, Derek and Anand.Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
im not biased towards either card. i myself own a 9800pro. what concerns me is the immaturity shown by other ATI card owners. you guys act like nvidia can never measure up to ATI (which is so untrue). there was none/little difference in the IQ and benchmark results (with few exceptions, but explanations were given for the most part). also keep in mind that the 9800xt specs are higher than the 5900/5950 and it still managed to get beat in some of the tests. anyway, good job nvidia. you guys are certainly headed in the right direction. i was a bit sad to see my card excluded though :( ... they said they'll benchmark the value cards soon...i hope to see mine there ;)ps: i could be wrong about the specs, but i do remember anand saying the XT had higher memory bandwidth (which could've accounted for some performance differences).
all in all, a good review, ill be waiting for more updates.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
18, he says he saw it saw it, he doesnt know why it was there, there is no reason to exclude regular fps graphs, especially since people want to know the fps of this game, since it is the ONLY truly dx9 game in the entire suiteAnonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Hey Anand did nvidias check arrive yetAnonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Haha, yet again, we see fanATIcs (#10, #14) coming out of the woodworks to claim that Anandtech's review is either biased or NVIDIA is still cheating. lmao, losers!And by the way #14, you're plain dumb if you couldn't figure out that the TR:AOD graphs were showing a percentage difference. Christ, read the review.