![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , December 17, 2002
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Sean Quinn
- Google +1
Tyan Tachyon G9700 Pro
Tyan is making an introduction into the graphics card community. They are pushing forward with a series of ATI Powered video cards engineered for the hardcore gamer and overclocker. This is our PREview of their 9700 based engineering sample.
3DMark2001SE
We're using the latest version of 3DMark2001SE (build 330) for our testing. We ran each test at default 3DMark2001SE settings in the benchmark.
At stock speeds of 325MHz/310MHz at 1024x768, we got a score of 14,602 3DMarks. When overclocked to 385MHz/340MHz, the score went up 653 points to 15,255 3DMarks. At 1280x1024 the default score was 12,259, which rose 976 points to 13,235 3DMarks when overclocked. At 1600x1200 we got a score of 10,369, which rose 999 points to 11,368 3DMarks. Apparently overclocking helped most as the resolution increased, since that would push the VPU harder more than the CPU.
To get an even better idea of what exactly is gained from overclocking in 3DMark, you can look at the details. I have compared the default clock speed to the overclocked speed in each resolution as indicated above. Let’s first take a look at 1024x768. Overclocking helped the Game 1 Car Chase Low Detail by about 10 FPS, but the high detail score actually went down. Game 2 Dragothic showed respectable gains, however Game 3 Lobby didn’t show much gain at all. Game 4 Nature increased by 12 FPS. Vertex Shader speed stayed about the same, while the Pixel Shader tests did show an increase. At 1280x1024 Game 1 Car Chase showed a higher gain in Low Detail and finally showed a very slight gain in High Detail. Game 2 Dragothic showed a very noticeable gain and Game 3 Lobby also showed a gain finally. Game 4 Nature is up 9 FPS, which is less than at 1024x768. Vertex and Pixel Shader speeds showed a very noticeable increase as well. At 1600x1200 all the Game tests showed an increase. The Nature test, however, only showed a 6 FPS increase, lessening as the resolution increases it seems. Vertex and Pixel shader speeds again showed a noticeable increase in performance.
Unreal Tournament 2003
Full Installation of Unreal Tournament 2003 with patch 2136 was used. For our tests, we're using our UT2003 Benchmarking utility. (Feel free to distribute or use this benchmark tool, as we hope it will help give us more comparable "apples to apples" benchmarks across the web.) Resolutions of 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200 were tested in High Quality mode with no anti-aliasing, 2X anti-aliasing, 4X anti-aliasing and 6X anti-aliasing with 16X Quality Anisotropic filtering enabled as well in the Antalus, Inferno, and Suntemple maps. Because of the amount of info to compare, I put a comparison of both default clock speed and overclocked speeds compared against each other in all the quality settings in the graphs.
In the Antalus map at 1024x768 with no AA and no AF, we get a score of 152.6 FPS, when overclocked it increases 7.6 FPS to 160.2. The highest increase is at 1280x1024, with a 12 FPS improvement from overclocking with no AA and no AF. When 2X AA and 16X AF are enabled, UT2003 does take a pretty big hit in performance, down to 73 FPS at 1024x768 and down to a laggy 36 FPS at 1600x1200. When overclocked with 2X AA and 16X AF enabled, we do gain about 10 FPS at 1024x768, about 7 FPS at 1280x1024, and only 5 FPS at 1600x1200. When we move to 4X or 6X AA, we really don’t lose a lot of performance at 1024x768 and 1280x1024. When overclocked, it allows us to play it smooth at 1280x1024 with 2X AA and 16X AF, or 1024x768 with 4 or 6X AA and 16X AF.
Sun Temple pretty much shows the same scenario we saw in the Antalus map, except 6X AA here seems to take a larger hit in performance at 1280x1024. Overclocking didn’t help as much as I thought it would at 4X and 6X AA in 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. For the best IQ with the best performance in the Suntemple map, you could play at 2X AA and 16X AF at 1280x1024 or 4X AA at 1024x768. When overclocked, those still seem to be the best settings and resolutions to play at on this map.
Inferno is even harder on the Tyan 9700 Pro card here. The best playable IQ and Performance setting is going to be 1024x768 with 2X AA and 16X AF. When overclocked, you may be able to go up to 1280x1024 with 2X AA and 16X AF and get around a 50 FPS average, which would be smooth.