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- Date:
- Thursday , October 23, 2003
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
GeForceFX 5950 Ultra PREview
A preview of NVIDIA’s new flagship video gaming GPU. We take their reference GFFX 5950Ultra and show you performance compared to the competition in a way that we never have before. Real games, real Image Quality, real frame rates.
Max Payne 2
(DirectX 9)
Who can forget bullet time? That is one of the features that Max Payne is well known for. The Matrix-like slow motion gunfights and dodging bullets caught on and was a very cool feature in a new game back then. Well, it is all back in Max Payne 2 which went into retail sale last week.
Max Payne 2, just like Max Payne, is a narrative driven action game. The combat sequences are almost cinematic in style. The story line is that of a Film Noir love story between a cop and a female murder suspect. Bullet Time 2.0 swings into play with improved slow motion gunplay. What also makes this game fun is that it has integrated Havok’s physics engine for ragdoll character effects as well as interactive environments. The graphics system has also been beefed up with support for DirectX9 and has effects such as realistic rain, lightning, and explosions and high resolution textures.
These are the settings we used on all cards to test with. Note that we chose to let Max Payne 2 decide the Antialiasing mode. We left each card on Application Preference in their control panels for AA and enabled 4XAA from Max Payne 2. We also had 8XAF enabled from each card's control panel. Everything else was set to its highest setting in the game.
We used FRAPS frame counter and MP2's Part III Chapter 7 (Woden’s Manor) for our framerate evaluation. Our histogram data was taken at 1280x1024 4XAA/8XAF. We used repeatable manual run-throughs.
As you can see in the histogram, we ran through this level for 73 seconds on each card and recorded the FRAPS results here. Looking at the performance of the GFFX 5950Ultra we see that it dipped down to 31FPS at its slowest point. The 5900Ultra dipped down to 29FPS. At the same time the "slowest" frames per second shown by the 9800XT was 50FPS. It is obviously clear here which card performs better and that card is not in the GeForceFX family.
What we also need to look at is how consistent each card is throughout the run-through. All three cards seem to spike around the 17 – 21 second mark but then the 5950Ultra and 5900Ultra fall fast down to the 30FPS mark, while the 9800XT remains above 60FPS. The 5950Ultra does provide an improvement over the 5900Ultra, but it isn’t by much.
The game was very playable at 1280x1024 4XAA/8XAF on both the GFFX 5950Ultra and the Radeon 9800XT; however the 9800XT gives you even more performance to play with if you wish to increase to 1600x1200 or perhaps 6XAA or 16XAF at 1280x1024.
Screenshots:
We also wanted to look at screenshot comparisons between the cards. You can add –screenshot to the command line of the Max Payne 2 shortcut to enable an in-game screenshot mode. While you are in a game all you have to do is press the "F10" key and it will save a screenshot to the directory of your "Max Payne 2" in a folder called "screenshots".
For our testing we took screenshots at 1024x768 4XAA/8XAF. We took a total of six screenshots in the following levels:
Part I Chapter 1 (Vlad’s Warehouse)
Part I Chapter 5 (Max’s Apartment Building Cont’d)
Part II Chapter 3 (Condemned Building Cont’d)
Part II Chapter 4 (Construction Site, as Mona)
Part III Chapter 7 (Woden’s Manor)
Part III Chapter 8 (Woden’s Manor cont’d)
After flipping back and forth between each picture and looking long and hard at them we could not see any differences in image quality. The level of Trilinear filtering seemed to be just fine as well for both cards, as the filtering was not obtrusive while moving through the levels. The only major difference between the GeForceFX 5950Ultra and the Radeon 9800XT in Max Payne 2 is pure performance, of which the 9800XT has approximately double in some cases.