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
An even more updated Test Suite
In Part 1 we introduced our new test suite; this edition brings some refinements and four additions, but (believe it or not) it is still not complete. It isn't our goal to simply throw numbers into space and see what happens, so we are really focusing on honing our benchmarks to make them as robust and accurate as possible. As such, we have had to forgo a few additions that we really wanted to make, and we've had to drop one of the titles we had included in Part 1. This is how the new suite looks as things stand for this article:
Aquamark3
C&C Generals: Zero Hour
EVE: The Second Genesis
F1 Challenge '99-'02
Final Fantasy XI
GunMetal
Halo
Homeworld 2
Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
Neverwinter Nights: Shadow of Undrendtide
SimCity 4
Splinter Cell
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness
Tron 2.0
Unreal Tournament 2003
Warcraft III: Frozen Throne
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory
X2: The Threat
Our previous Flight Simulator benchmark just didn't push the game far enough, and we are hard at work trying to find a benchmark that better reflects gameplay and is completely repeatable. We have really appreciated your feedback, and we ask that you continue to suggest games for possible inclusion in the suite. Just so you'll know what we already have slated to make it in "When their done" (to borrow from 3DRealms), these games will be added either as we finalize a benchmarking procedure for them or as they are released:
Doom3
MS Flight Simulator 2004
Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons of WWII
Halflife 2
FIFA Soccer 2004
We wanted to include Battlefield in this review unfortunately we were still unable to come up with a repeatable test to include. We have looked at other tests on the net and would rather use something a bit more scientific if possible but it's going to take some more time. If anyone from the Battlefield community has any suggestions on how to reliably benchmark the game, we're all ears.
As we received some criticism that the CPU we used in Part 1 wasn't fast enough, we upgraded our testbed for Part 2; the test system we used is as follows:
AMD Athlon64 FX51
1GB DDR400 (2x512MB)
nForce3 motherboard
With all of that out of the way, it's time to get to the benchmarks…
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Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
#41 "[...] who butters your bread???"Thats an interesting question, I suspect he does though my question is "who wants to know?" ; )
In regard to your other question. "Why can't we have a true winner now?". As for myself, I'm going to give Dereck and Anand the benefit of the doubt.
It seems to me that they realize that NVIDIA attempted to do somthing unique with it's 5000 series being that it does not exactly hold to the Direct X 9.1 spec. For instance it has a 16 bit and 32 bit rendering mode while DX 9.1 requires 24 bit - which ATI does (refer to Halflife 2 and DOOM III reviews). In the sharder area NVIDIA holds FAR more code (micro ops) than ATI - also if you check back to Anand's original post on the ATI and NVIDIA shootout(s) where there is a comparison between AA and AF NVIDIA was a CLEAR winner. I seem to recall a while ago that NVIDIA claimed ATI didn't do TRUE AF so they were therefore CHEATING. Boy did that one come back around with teeth, huh?
What I'm saying is NVIDIA tried to one up ATI by tring to do more, unfortunately it seems they tried to do TOO much and ended up doing SHADY maneuvers like the whole Future Mark mess. They should of instead focused on the spec. DX 9.1 and the Microsoft shader/pixel code path and not tried to pull a GLIDE like 3DFX (excuse the parsed english).
So, hopefully NVIDIA learns from it's mistakes modifies it's silicon to the spec. and gives us all BETTER cards to choose from come March/April.
As far as the authors are concerned, Anand and Derick seem to be attempting JUSTICE (helping the party who needs the most help, and treating all parties equally) - which in this case seems to be NVIDIA. The authors are helping NVIDIA by dropping HEAVY hints like what you stated
" Next year will be the year of DX9 titles, and it will be under the next generation of games that we will finally be able to crown a true DX9 winner. Until then, anyone's guess is fair game." and
" If NVIDIA can continue to extract the kinds of performance gains from unoptimized DX9 code as they have done with the 52.14 drivers (without sacrificing image quality), they will be well on their way to taking the performance crown back from ATI by the time NV40 and R400 drop.".
If NVIDIA takes head of these CONSTRUCTIVE statements then the entire gaming community could benifit - in better prices, higher quality to which the customer usually benifits (AMD vs INTEL sound familiar?).
So, let us be easy and enjoy the night. Time will tell.
Cheers,
aka #37
PS: Dereck please excuse me for leaving out your name before. The article was well written.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Regarding my previous post #44, I wanted to write:...the difference **between AA/AF and noAA/AF** is very noticeable in the game...
Jeff7181 - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Can you say "highly programmable GPU?" I can =)Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Why didn't you guys wait for Catalyst 3.8? It's out tomorrow and is reported to fix many IQ problems in games like NWN. What would a couple of days have hurt, especially since this article is going to be irrelevant after the Cat drivers are released tomorrow?Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Note: the AA/AF and noAA/AF images of Warcraft3 have been mixed up for the NV52.14.It tells a lot about the value of the screenshots that it takes careful inspection to find this error. I have played a lot of War3 recently and the difference is very noticeable in game, even with this GF4.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
#18 Its not a problem figuring out the graphs its just weird that he would choose that type of graph excluding FPS.BTW I own a 5900U and a 9700pro.
I don't like people avoiding ps2.0 tests. My 5900 sucks at it. I paid too much for what I got in the 5900. I try to get a good bang for the buck. The 5900 is not.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
...DerekWilson - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
First off... Thanks Pete ;-) ...Secondly, Anand and I both put a great deal of work into this article, and I am very glad to see the responses it has generated.
Many of the image quality issues from part 1 were due to rendering problems that couldn't be captured in a screen shot (like jerkiness in X2 and F1), or a lack of AA. For some of the tests, we just didn't do AA performance benchmarks if one driver or the other didn't do what it was supposed to. There were no apples to anything other than apples tests in this review. The largest stretch was X2 where the screen was jerky and the AA was subpar. But we definitly noted that.
TRAOD isn't a very high quality game, and certainly isn't the only DX9 (with PS2.0) test on the list. Yes, ATI beat NV in that bench. But its also true that ATI won most of the other benchmarks as well.
Anyway, thanks again for the feedback, sorry BF1942 couldn't make it in, and we'll be bring back a flight sim game as soon as we tweak it out.
J Derek Wilson
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Didn't Gabe Newell complain about screen capture "issues" with the Nvidia 50.xx drivers that show better image quality in screenshots than actually shows up in game?Anand spoke about image quality problems in almost every test in part 1, but i see almost nothing wrong with the screencaps in part 2.
Can you verify this Anand?
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
No difference in IQ, huh? Am I the only person to notice an IQ difference between the AA+8xAF pics of Aquamark3?http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/video/roundups...
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/video/roundups...
It's funny how Anand and Derek did not comment on this. Maybe they missed it because they based their comparison off of those tiny images. Ah, so that's what the need of full-sized images are for?!