ATI's X1000 Series: Extended Performance Testing
by Derek Wilson on October 7, 2005 10:15 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Chronicles of Riddick Performance
We don't have as much data as we would like for The Chronicles of Riddick as it looks like the game itself checks the capabilities of our monitor before allowing a setting to be run. While the monitor that we use to test games at high resolutions is capable of running at up to 2048x1536, the data it reports to graphics cards is unreliable. NVIDIA and ATI allow for the ability to specify manually the limits of one's monitor, but in this case, the game goes straight to the flawed source. In any case, all these tests were run with the shader level set to 2.0.
With the data that we have, the high end NVIDIA cards absolutely dominate this benchmark. The 6800 GT even performs as well as the X1800 XT. The X850 XT keeps up with the X1800 XL, and the only surprise is that the X1600 XT performs the same as the 6600 GT. Once again, the playability of the X1300 Pro is limited to 1024x768.
We don't have as much data as we would like for The Chronicles of Riddick as it looks like the game itself checks the capabilities of our monitor before allowing a setting to be run. While the monitor that we use to test games at high resolutions is capable of running at up to 2048x1536, the data it reports to graphics cards is unreliable. NVIDIA and ATI allow for the ability to specify manually the limits of one's monitor, but in this case, the game goes straight to the flawed source. In any case, all these tests were run with the shader level set to 2.0.
With the data that we have, the high end NVIDIA cards absolutely dominate this benchmark. The 6800 GT even performs as well as the X1800 XT. The X850 XT keeps up with the X1800 XL, and the only surprise is that the X1600 XT performs the same as the 6600 GT. Once again, the playability of the X1300 Pro is limited to 1024x768.
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tfranzese - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
These points were brought up about the first article too. It's a big improvement, I agree, but it's still not to the level that this site was founded on.DerekWilson - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
We already commented on the FEAR Demo -- we won't test a game that doesn't show shipping performance characteristics. We are working on getting our hands on a prerelease copy of the shipping game for testing.We have had black and white 2 in house since it became available at best buy (as today is the official US launch, we got it a couple days early). We just haven't had enough time to finalize tests for it.
We will look into the recently released call of duty 2 demo among others. I agree that we could have done things better, and hopefully our coming follow up will hit all the points people want covered.
If you have any other suggestions, please let us know -- we will try our best to include them.
PrinceGaz - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
As for other suggestions, how about some games other than FPS or FPS-view (EQ2) style games? A driving game like NFS:U2 or colin McRae Rally 2005 would be an excellent addition. Then you should have some sort of flight/space-sim, like maybe X2. And a roleplaying game that isn't viewed from a first-person perspective. By including games that have a totally different style of graphics, you'll get a better idea of how well the card performs. X2 for instance would require totally different graphics performance than Half-Life 2.I know some of the games I've mentioned don't have a benchmarking mode, but use FRAPS to get the average framerate. And the minimum framerate. In fact the minimum framerate is more important than the average so you should include it as a matter of course in *all* tests, even to the point of dropping the average framerate if you don't have space. No one is too bothered if the average framerate while playing is 45 or 50fps while playing a game, but the difference between minimum framerates of 20 and 25fps would definitely be noticeable. I'm sure others will agree.
This (and many other) site seems to think FPS games are all people play, but a lot of us play games from all genres, so including them would be useful.
coldpower27 - Saturday, October 8, 2005 - link
I support the use of X2: The Threat as a benchmark, I also support the use of shipping games to compare numbers, so Anandtech should benchmark Black & White 2 as it is now available, plus Call of Duty 2 & Fear when they become available.bob661 - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
Even though I found the original article very informative (I guess I can read well), this one was much better. The bar graphs don't show how the performance goes down as you raise the resolution and turn on the eye candy.zmanww - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
what no Overclocking?come on I want to see that this baby can really do.
Peldor - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
I don't think the usual overclocking utilities are working for the X1x00 cards yet.DerekWilson - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
this is true -- we wanted to test slower versions and couldn't because of this.also reference board overclocking isn't always the best indication of retail board performance.
Lonyo - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
Would be nice to see some analysis of ATi's SM3 implimentation, with SM2 vs SM3 benchmarks in the games which do support SM2 and SM3 paths.tfranzese - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
From the article:I think the analysis and the conclusions up to this point have been far short sighted. Seems that the games that are using SM3.0 are taking considerable advantage of the new architecture. The Tech Report, Hexus and others were able to show that much.