![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, April 10, 2002
- Author:
- Steve Lynch
- Editor:
- Sean Quinn
- Google +1
Hercules 3D Prophet FDX 8500LE
As you might know, Hercules has a new partner in crime in fellow Frenchman, ATi. Let's see if Hercules' first ATi GPU based VidCard stands up to the Hercules namesake.
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter
We are using Serious Sam: The Second Encounter for benchmarking. I am using the script "Extreme Quality". Extreme Quality sets everything to maximum quality plus Anisotropic at 8 sample. Utilizing Anisotropic in this game goes a long way for visual quality improvements. The demo used was Elephant Atrium at 1024 x 768 32bit.
The performance hit from Anisotropic filtering is evident, performance is almost halved across the board. The Radeon 8500 cards are certainly putting the GeForce3 Ti500 to the test here, though. The GF4 Ti4600, as expected, had little problems with this test, and easily bested the other cards.
Of course, it will be argued that this benchmark is "not fair", as the 8500 and NVIDIA cards use very different methods for Anisotropic filtering.
Vulpine GLMark
Vulpine's GLMark is an OpenGL benchmark we use to show the advantages of T&L based cards. We used the following settings: Compatibility - GeForce3 Features; Detail - High; No VSync; Additional Compatibility - Use OpenGL Lighting, Use Vertex Array Range, Use Texture Compression; Textures - 32bit; Screen Resolution: Fullscreen, 32bit. Resolution 1024 x 768.
The Radeon based cards both show very poor OpenGL performance in comparison to the NVIDIA based cards. We spoke with ATi about the lower than expected OpenGL performance to which they replied that future driver releases should significantly increase OpenGL performance.
AquaMark
The Aquanox demo is a movie type demo shot inside the Krass Engine that Aquanox uses. AquaMark is a benchmark we initially used when the GeForce3 came out, because it supported pixel shaders in the GeForce3 and is a very stressing benchmark on current hardware. Now that we have better drivers and faster video cards, we think it's a good time to throw it into the mix now that all these cards support the pixel shaders in this game.
Heavy duty use of Pixel Shaders keeps the framerate of all these cards, with the exception of the GF4 card, to a minimum. With a margin of maybe 10% between them, the GF3 Ti500 and Radeon 8500 based cards are certainly holding their own in this very intensive benchmark. Even at a resolution of 1024 x 768 and 32bit textures, the AquaMark demo is very demanding.
Comanche 4:
Novalogic recently released the Comanche 4 Demo with built in benchmarking capabilities and DirectX 8.1 support. We will be using the Comanche4 Benchmark as a standard part of our graphics card benchmarking suite. The full demo can be downloaded here so you can see how your system compares. Default configuration at 1024 x 768 32bit color settings.
The Comanche 4 benchmark demo is a unique benchmark as it represents a real-world gaming experience. It contains the single player "Eagle's Talon" mission from the game as well as a detailed cinematic. This DirectX 8.1 benchmark demo will measure your system's performance in the standard frames per second format.
Being that this is a new benchmark for us, I was very interested to see just how well the Radeon based cards would do. As you can see from the results, the GF3 card sports about 10% better performance than the Radeon cards.