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
Final Fantasy XI Performance
We couldn't take any screenshots of Final Fantasy XI because the demo would quit if you hit any keys at all, thus preventing us from capturing any screenshots. Final Fantasy doesn't really show image quality differences, though, in my opinion, overall image quality could be greatly improved. The graphics are many times motion blurred, AA and AF can't be used, and it really does look like a playstation port to the PC. Of course, there are some very cool effects and the overall look is definitely on par with Square's previous work.
Again, we take the frame count provided by the benchmark and divide by its runtime (loosly 275 seconds). The actual number we divide by doesn't make a difference for comparison sake as its simply a scaling factor. Since this is the same number we used for the previous article, we can get a little taste of Final Fantasy CPU scaling.
As we can see, ATI is still ahead in this benchmark.
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Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
How very balanced of you #30.Let us be patient; Anand is asking questions on OUR behalf in order to REVEAL truth.
I'm focused on the questions and the answers. Where is your focus?
AgaBooga - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
#33, that's what came to my mind as soon as I read this article. I think that Anand may have just provided some input, done testing, or just edited it slightly...Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
The IQ shots are not the best I could imagine.Some of them are cropped out so that you can't see a lot of details: UT2003, Aquamark3, Wolfenstein.
Some of them are set up so that you wouldn't get any possible artifacts with texture filtering, because of the high camera angle: Warcraft3, C&C Generals.
The Tomb Raider, Aquamark and Wolf screenshots are also too dark to notice anything. And I don't see any sign of a DX9 shader in either the Halo or the TR shots, so we have no idea of DX9 image quality.
But kudos for all the testing you've done, must have been a lot of hard work.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
#30 ATI has not released performance drivers for a long time now and they already said don't hold your breath on those performance increases coming in the 3.8s either. The main focus since the 3.1s have mainly it seems been bug fixes with slight performance improvements in various games. 3.8 = more features and bug fixes with probably slight performance improvements here and there in specific games.Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Derek probably wrote the whole article while Anand was behind him cracking his whip. So I dunno about this "supposed" two authors!Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Would all the fanboys please take a deep breath or troll elsewhere? I swear to god some of you people will go out of your way to look for bias where there isn't any.I own a 9800 Pro and I for one am glad that it seems like Nvidia has closed the gap considerably, their customers deserve it.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Great review, I love the IQ shots. I too am waiting to see the 9600xt review though.AgaBooga - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
To those of you mentioned Anand a few times, you should also note this was written by two authors. Or atleast worked on together by two authors, so you should try and understand that you may different "types" of responses and analyses (sp?) of similar results if they're done by different people. I think we should wait for the 3.8 Cat. article before we jump to too many conclusions.PKIte - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
This is the way I take screen shots in final fantasy XI benchmark 2.- Use Hypersnap-dx
- Enable directx capture in Hypersnap
- Change Hypersnap “Quick Save” settings to repeat capture every 5 seconds
- Launch Final Fantasy XI benchmark 2 menu
- When you click the “START” button press “Print Screen” once resolution changes.
Wow this is the biggest video card review I have ever read: Awesome!!
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
>Right now NVIDIA is at a disadvantage; ATI's >hardware is much easier to code for and the >performance on Microsoft's HLSL compiler clearly >favors the R3x0 over the NV3xever heard from the ps2_a compiler target?