X3 Reunion: New Rolling Demo Tested

Performance Tests

We found that the X3 rolling demo makes a good benchmark due to its excellent graphics. The benchmark is fairly long and covers many different aspects of the game like fighting and building complex structures. In addition to being able to adjust standard settings like resolution and AA/AF, there are high, medium and low options for both shader and texture quality. There is also a handy feature that sends a breakdown of the details of the different scenes in the demo to a file for reference. These details include average, minimum and maximum frame rates for each scene in the demo, as well as the settings enabled for the benchmark. We ran several tests with X3 to see the kind of results that we would get across a range of NVIDIA and ATI cards. Here is the list of cards as well as the system that we tested:

Testbed
Processor:	AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 Processor
Memory:	2x512MB OCZ 2-2-2-6 1T DDR400 RAM
Motherboard:	SI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI
Hard Drive:	Seagate 7200.7 120 GB
Power Supply:	OCZ 600 W PowerStream
Graphics Card:	NVIDIA 6600 GT NVIDIA 6800 GS NVIDIA 7800 GT NVIDIA 7800 GTX NVIDIA 7800 GTX (512) ATI X800 GTO ATI X1300 Pro ATI X1600 XT ATI X1800 XL ATI X1800 XT

*Note we only included the lower performing cards in the 12x10 graphs, and included the 7800 GTX 512 and X1800 XT for reference.

The interesting thing that we see here is how close together all the numbers are. It's also interesting to see that X3 seems to favor both ATI and NVIDIA hardware in the same manner, as NVIDIA does better in general by only a few frames. Overall, the results are somewhat eerie given that each card on one side of the ATI/NVIDIA line gets a very similar frame rate to its competition on the other side. This means that the X3 rolling demo will probably make a very well-rounded addition to our performance benchmarks for future reviews.

We also wanted to see how CPU intensive X3 was on our system, so we tested the game on our highest performing card (7800 GTX 512) with both our standard 2.6GHz processor (AMD Athlon FX-55) and a slower 1.8GHz processor (the FX-55 with a multiplier of 9 to simulate a slower processor). This helps us get a better idea of how much CPU speed affects performance in the game.

Processor	AA/AF	Resolution	Performance
2.6GHz	Enabled	1600x1200	47.5
		1280x1024	57.8
	Disabled	1600x1200	59.0
		1280x1024	63.8
1.8GHz	Enabled	1600x1200	44.9
		1280x1024	49.5
	Disabled	1600x1200	50.4
		1280x1024	50.8

As illustrated, what is most noticeable here is that without AA enabled, the benchmark's frame rate on the 1.8GHz system is almost exactly the same between the two resolutions. Even when AA is enabled at 12x10, we are still CPU bound. This means that, in general, lower speed processors will have a large impact on framerate for higher end graphics cards. Even our high end CPU was limited with high end graphics cards plugged in, making this game a good CPU benchmark as well as a good GPU test. People with mid-range GPUs probably won't need anything more than an entry level current generation Athlon 64 for good performance - after all, we will never run into the CPU limit if the graphics card isn't fast enough to outpace the CPU when running X3.