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
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?