![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , October 01, 2002
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Editor:
- Sean Quinn
- Google +1
AMD 2800+
AMD is once again looking for the coveted Speed Crown and this time they enlist the help of NVIDIA in their quest.
3D Gaming Benchmarks:
Aren't these the ones we really wanted to see anyway?
We run our 3D gaming benchmarks in low resolutions when not specifically testing video cards. This allows us to use the gaming engines as a benchmark that will more aptly focus on CPU and memory bandwidth issues.
Quake 3 Arena remains the de facto 3D OpenGL benchmark, even though the engine is now three years old. While not a benchmark to stress today's top performing video cards, it still does a very good job of finding CPU and subsystem limits.
While we still see Intel retain its dominance in this benchmark, we're still amazed at our 2800+/nForce2 combination. Simply put, it pulled 50FPS out of thin air. Of course, we know there's a lot of work behind this...
3DMark 2001SE is the newest MadOnion 3D benchmark, recently updated to use some of the features found in DirectX 8.1. It's downloadable in a free format to stress your system with.
The nForce2/2800+ combo shows their leading of the AMD pack again, but get trumped by the power of the 2.8GHz Pentium 4 powered by DDR333.
Serious Sam - The Second Encounter is an actual in-game benchmark we use in its OpenGL form. It's a very fast-paced and popular game, although it does not take advantage of many of the graphical effects that we're seeing in many of today's cutting edge games. SS:TSE bucks the trend and shows us a new, tremendously popular game that relies on CPU horsepower.
My initial response with this was that there was something wrong. I reloaded an OS and drivers to run the nForce2 tests again and got nearly identical results. It seems as if the nForce2 way of doing things is a very good match with the Serious Sam engine.
While Jedi Knight 2 is based on the Quake 3 engine, they're not the same beast by a long shot. JK2 uses many new effects that put a tremendous strain back on your PC, giving us scores nowhere close to Quake 3 even at the "same" settings.
Again, we see our 2800+/nForce2 combination pull far ahead of their VIA counterparts and even a bit ahead of the Pentium 4. Certainly the nForce2 board is doing something that the VIA boards are not.
Novalogic recently released the Comanche 4 Demo with built in benchmarking capabilities and DirectX 8.1 support. We'll be using the Comanche4 Benchmark as a standard part of our graphics card benchmarking suite. The full demo can be downloaded at Novalogic so you can see how your system compares. Default configuration is 1024 x 768 at 32 bit color settings.
The Pentium 4 combination wins this round, but only by a fraction of a frame, while the nForce2 is showing again that it's better utilizing the power of the 2800+.
Unreal Tournament 2003 DEMO is out and about for your playing and benchmark please. It's a new game that uses some DX8 instructions, but not many. It does, however, bring with it many scenes that have a very high poly count. We use our own scripts to make sure we benchmarks fairly. The files and the information about them can be found here.
Even though this is a very new benchmark that we have very little experience with, we were still very surprised by the results, which were repeatable. The 2800+/nForce2 combination shows to be the strongest of the three, which is surprising after seeing the results above. Still, we need to refine this benchmarking process a bit more so we will see how UT2K3 benchmarking pans out in the future.