Low End Tests: Last Man Standing
And finally, we have the low end budget cards and previous generation equipment. We ran these tests at the default resolution set by each of the first three quality settings. We ran the High Quality setting, as last years midrange cards almost make our playable frame rate list. For some, this may be close enough, but we really want to see that 40-45 frames per second average before we call it rock solid.At Medium quality, the GeForce 4 Ti 4400 falls in our playable range, which is very impressive for such an old card. Medium quality still looks great, and even with the quantization visible on lighted surfaces (especially in specular highlights) is still aeons beyond what one would expect this venerable card to handle. The id team has certainly out done themselves with quality support for previous generation hardware while building in plenty of scalability.
Though we didn't test it here, the best setting for both the 5700 Ultra and 9600 XT is Medium Quality at 800x600, as it gives the best performance and balance of visual experience.
Another bit of goodness to take away from these tests is that Low Quality and Medium Quality really don't show a tangable difference on these cards. There is absolutely no reason to run Low Quality on any card that has more than 64MB of RAM. This means that textures won't be resized, though some quantization may be evident from the compression used on normal, specular, and diffuse maps.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
71 Comments
View All Comments
DerekWilson - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
we looked at doing a radeon 9550 ... if you absolute want it (and ask in the next 10 minutes) I may just sit down and run the card. From our understanding, its just and underclocked 9600 pro, which would likely put it at running medium quality at 640x480 to get by.bearxor - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
VILLAGERS DEMAND RADEON 9500 PRO BENCHMARKS!!!!DerekWilson - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
Wow ... ummm ... I had no idea that this thing would post the article page by page as I entered it into the engine ... Not working on much sleep makes one overlook certain important options in the engine I suppose.Sorry about that guys. Hopefully I won't be doing any all night benchmark-the-game-the-day-it-comes-out articles for a while and I can leave the posting to our wonderfully talented Managing Editor.
billbillw - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
Looks like my systems will be able to play this at high quality at 1024x768. For me that will be fine.billbillw - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
cosmotic - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
I dont think so punko. At first it was just and index, then there was a little content. Now its complete.punko - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
Nawthe problem that this "all night work" left them too dazed to build the web page properly
cosmotic - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
Whats this? realtime posting? Maybe you should make the article invisible until it is complete?vaeren - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
I suppose we'll never know what the third page of the article had to say. For all we know it could say that a SLI voodoo2 will run it beautifully.mcveigh - Tuesday, August 3, 2004 - link
where be de article!!!! har har!