Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup - Part 2: High End Shootout

Back to the game...

Since NVIDIA can't do floating point textures, PS2.0 shadows were left off, and we didn't use the NVIDIA shadow (depth sprites) for our cards as ATI doesn't support that. We have decided that since the glow effect uses PS 2.0 (and we are using this as a DX9 stress test rather than an actual game) this needs to be enabled. The 'goodness' of the glow effect has been questioned, but we aren't here to critique the quality of the implimentation. We simply want to test the raw power each card has to push TRAOD PS2.0 code. Personally, I think the effect glow had on the wall lights in the Paris demo was one of the only "pretty" things in the game.

Depth of Feild (DoF) is also on. After watching this demo hundreds of times, it really seems to me that using PS2.0 for DoF in TRAOD was overkill for what they ended up with. It just seems like they could have gotten similar results (with better frame rates) using lower detail (frequency) mipmaps and dynamic reduction of geometry. Of course, I could be way off base, but it just seems like there were better things that could have been done with PS 2.0 in this game.

We note that there have been issues with the accuracy of the Depth of Field post processing, but we think that the new 50 series of Detonators (along with the Cg compiler) will alleviate this issue. Of course, there are still some IQ issues in ATI's 3.7 cats.

As games and hardware move forward, post effects like DoF and rendered textures are going to be getting more and more complex, and the way hardware handles these things will be slightly different. It's less important to look at pixel level "sameness" between two solutions, but rather at overall image quality, and the impact of the effect. The user experience is what matters in this arena, and some things are going to be subjective. Pixel shader effects are much more intricate than geometry or T&L, and differences in architecture, precision, and drivers will all contribute to slight differences where no solution can clearly be labeled as more correct than another. Of course, that makes our job harder, but it will definitely be an interesting ride.

Anyway, in order to try to understand exactly how DX9 PS2.0 is affecting each graphics card, we are doing two tests at each resolution (with and without AA). The first test, everything we don't need to see something and have PS2.0 functionality is disabled. For the second test the only thing we do is turn off PS2.0 and run the benchmark again. The scores we will be giving you are in the form of percent decrease in performance when PS2.0 is enabled. This should give us some idea of how this implementation of PS2.0 scales on each card, and give us a good solid glimpse into the implications of DX9 in TRAOD (as this is the only game that will ever use this engine).