ATI's X1000 Series: Extended Performance Testing
by Derek Wilson on October 7, 2005 10:15 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Far Cry Performance
Crytek has done an excellent job keeping up with the times. As new technologies come out, it seems like they do their research into how to use them on their production game. Incorporating SM3.0 code, geometry instancing, HDR, and the like into their last patch adds value to their game, gives us a platform with which to test the current incarnation of their engine, and gives potential game engine customers a look at what they could be getting in a shipping product. We are already hearing about another patch that will further extend the impact of HDR on the game, among other things. For these tests, we crank the graphics quality settings up to very high (ultra high for water) and let the chips fall where they may. The demo that we used for this test was the built-in regulator demo.
These tests show the top end ATI and NVIDIA cards running neck and neck. The 7800 GT leads the X1800 XL in performance (which is on par with the 6800 GT in the tests that overlap). The X1600 XT is able to perform better than the 6600 GT, but we should hope to see that from a card that costs over 50% more if MSRP is anywhere near street price. Again, the X1300 shouldn't be played at over 1024x768 unless the settings are dropped.
Enabling AA gives the advantage to the X1800 XT while the X1800 XL still lags behind the 7800 GT. The X1600 XT performs much better than the 6600 GT (which we wouldn't recommend running with AA).
Once again, the X1800 XT handles the impact of AA better than any other card. The added memory bandwidth is likely the reason why we keep seeing such good handling of AA. The 7800 GT and 7800 GTX both handle AA almost as well as the X1800 XL (and finally over-take the new ATI part at 2048x1536).
Crytek has done an excellent job keeping up with the times. As new technologies come out, it seems like they do their research into how to use them on their production game. Incorporating SM3.0 code, geometry instancing, HDR, and the like into their last patch adds value to their game, gives us a platform with which to test the current incarnation of their engine, and gives potential game engine customers a look at what they could be getting in a shipping product. We are already hearing about another patch that will further extend the impact of HDR on the game, among other things. For these tests, we crank the graphics quality settings up to very high (ultra high for water) and let the chips fall where they may. The demo that we used for this test was the built-in regulator demo.
These tests show the top end ATI and NVIDIA cards running neck and neck. The 7800 GT leads the X1800 XL in performance (which is on par with the 6800 GT in the tests that overlap). The X1600 XT is able to perform better than the 6600 GT, but we should hope to see that from a card that costs over 50% more if MSRP is anywhere near street price. Again, the X1300 shouldn't be played at over 1024x768 unless the settings are dropped.
Enabling AA gives the advantage to the X1800 XT while the X1800 XL still lags behind the 7800 GT. The X1600 XT performs much better than the 6600 GT (which we wouldn't recommend running with AA).
Once again, the X1800 XT handles the impact of AA better than any other card. The added memory bandwidth is likely the reason why we keep seeing such good handling of AA. The 7800 GT and 7800 GTX both handle AA almost as well as the X1800 XL (and finally over-take the new ATI part at 2048x1536).
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nserra - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
I agree.When doing some article the site must say if they are doing a preview, review or overview.
Questar - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
"High quality anisotropic filtering is definitely something that we have begged of NVIDIA and ATI for a long time and we are glad to see it, but the benefits just aren't that visible in first-person shooters and the like."So you like all the texture shimmering on a 7800?!?
DerekWilson - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
We will absolutely be looking further in depth on the shimmering issue.But texture shimmering and the impact of ATI's new High Quality AF option aren't the same problem. Certainly angle independant AF will help games where both ATI and NV have shimmering issues, but those instances occur less often and in things like space and flight games.
I don't like shimmering, and I do like the option for High Quality AF. But I simply wanted to say that the option for High Quality AF is not worth the price difference.
PrinceGaz - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
We're not talking about ATI's new angle-independent HQ AF option. It's nVidia's over-agressive trilinear-filtering optimisations that all 7800 series cards are doing, almost to the point of it being bilinear-filtering. They did that a couple of years ago and are doing it again now, but only on the 7800 series cards (6800 and under get normal filtering).If you want an example of this, just look at the transitions between mipmaps on the 7800 in the first review of the new ATI cards. I'm not talking about spikes on certain angles, but how the 7800 almost immediately jumps from one mipmap to the next, whereas ATI blends the transition far better. In fact, that is the main thing that struck me about those AF patterns in the review.
Over-agressive trilinear-optimisation is a problem even on 6800 series cards after supposedly disabling it in the drivers (it reduces the impact of it). I just wish it could be turned off entirely as some games need full true trilinear filtering to avoid shimmering.
DerekWilson - Saturday, October 8, 2005 - link
I know what you are talking about.The issue is that *I* was talking about the new HQ AF option in ATI hardware in the sentence Questar quoted in the original post in this thread.
He either thought I was talking about good AF in general or that the HQ AF has something to do with why ATI doesn't have a texture shimmering problem.
I just wanted to clear that up.
Also, the real problem with NVIDIA hardware is the combination of trilinear and anisotropic optmizations along side the "rose" style angle dependant AF. Their "brilinear" method of waiting until near the mipmap transition to blend textures is a perfectly fine solution if just using trilinear filtering (the only point of which is to blurr the transition lines between mipmaps anyway).
TheInvincibleMustard - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
Hard|OCP did some image quality comparisons between the 7800GT and the X1800XL in their "X1000" launch article, and there was a noticable difference between ATi's HQAF and nVidia's AF, and in a FPS no less. Add in the fact that they pretty much said that you could enable HQAF for hardly any performance drop, and that's a pretty nice point in ATi's favor.I think that AnandTech should look at an IQ comparison again, if they're not seeing any difference.
-TIM
nserra - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
I agree. New image quality tests must be done.Or maybe nvidia cards with 2 x performance of Ati, but with xgi/sis image quality is OK.
I don’t think so.
S3 and XGI have been plagued by their texture quality (image quality). But no one cares if those problems come from an Nvidia card.
X8xx was supposed to offer lower image quality than R3xx, but no one really has showed that.
bob661 - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
I've never experienced image quality issues on NVidia or ATI cards. They both look the same to me. YMMV.ChrisSwede - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
I was wondering what card available now that compares to my 9800 PRO? i.e. which card should I look for in reviews and equate to mine??Maybe none? :)
Thanks
ChrisSwede - Friday, October 7, 2005 - link
Thanks