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

Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness

So, as I'm writing this, the phrase "be careful what you wish for" comes to mind. I had my reasons for not wanting to benchmark this game, and in order for me to feel comfortable with handing out the numbers I need to touch on some of the more important issues. The inclusion of TRAOD in this benchmark suite is based on the demand of the community (as everything here always will be). But it's also our duty to try to make sure the information you get here is complete (which is a daunting task for this particular game).

Our initial thinking was that TRAOD simply isn't a very good game, nor would it be representative of future DX9 games. The graphics features are no where near as impressive as something along the lines of Half Life 2 and high dynamic range effects, and it looks more like a DX7 game running on DX9 shaders. It is our opinion that this game won't be heavily played and is more of just a synthetic benchmark people want to see in order to try to predict future performance.

Unfortunately, future performance can't be predicted until we have games from the future. No one seems to want to lend me a time machine, so I can't get those numbers yet. Looking back though, I can offer this advice: don't spend $500 on a video card until the game you want to play on it comes out. Trying to buy something now in order to be ready for games of the future only means that you won't have that money to spend on the newest best card that's out at that point. I also feel comfortable saying that TRAOD performance is a predictor of nothing but TRAOD performance.

In taking this stance, we have decided to do things a little differently than most other sites when it comes to TRAOD. We have turned this game into a sort of stress test that pushes the cards as far as they can go in order to only test the real world impact of DX9 Pixel Shaders. We did four tests at each resolution in order to see the performance differences with and without PS 2.0 and with and without AA. For each card, we use the application to set all the features and left the drivers alone. Part of the reasoning behind this was that AA in Tomb Raider only works if set by the application. Anisotropic filtering is selectable in the game, and was left off for all tests. The reason we check AA and not AF is that AF happens during texturing, but AA is implemented via shaders in TRAOD so it stresses the card in more of the way we want to test. But since we are comparing performance of each card to itself in order to see a performance delta, the actual settings shouldn't be a problem. Beyond3d has some extensive documentation of the TRAOD settings and all the options. If you'd like to learn more, I would point you to them.

For our tests, the only really important information is that we use the NVIDIA Cg compiler rather than the DX9 HLSL default compiler (there was no performance difference between the two on NVIDIA cards for the most part, only image quality improvements).