![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Thursday , October 30, 2003
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
BFG Asylum GFFX 5700Ultra Review
We take BFG’s new Asylum GeForceFX 5700Ultra for a spin in eight games and compare it with three popular cards in the mainstream market. Read inside for the gameplay evaluation.
Max Payne 2
(DirectX 9)
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 DirectX 9 and has effects such as realistic rain, lightning, mirror effects, 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 II Chapter 3 (Condemned Building cont'd) for our framerate evaluation. Our histogram data was taken at 1024x768 4XAA/8XAF. We used repeatable manual run-throughs in this level. Note that this is a different level used than in our NVIDIA GeForceFX 5950Ultra Preview. Part II Chapter 3 has a lot of particle, explosion and fire effects in it making for an intense graphic experience.
In Max Payne 2, looking at the performance of the BFG Asylum 5700Ultra compared to the Asylum 5600Ultra shows a very noticeable improvement in performance. The 5600Ultra bottoms out at 13FPS which is very unplayable and dips below the 30FPS mark a few times actually. While the 5700Ultra only dips below the 30FPS mark once at 21FPS. The average framerate is also up to 10FPS across the board for the 5700Ultra. The Radeon 9600XT is able to achieve a higher average framerate when you add it all up, however it dipped down to a low of 20FPS. The Radeon 9500Pro holds its own throughout this game providing performance that is right around the 9600XT level. However, it did get the second worse minimum FPS of 18, but only once in this manual run through. It did provide FPS performance that was 35FPS or higher.
Halo: Combat Evolved
(DirectX 9)
Halo supports multiple rendering paths. If the hardware detected supports Pixel Shader 2.0, Halo will run at this level. It also supports Pixel Shader 1.4, 1.1, and a Fixed Function (DX7) mode. For our testing we used the default rendering path the game selected for each card. We also installed the latest 1.02 patch.
In order to represent actual gameplay we relied on FRAPS and a manual run-through. Using FRAPS we ran through a certain path in the “Assault on the Control Room” mission. This level was the hardest in terms of performance on our cards. There are lots of mirrored bumped surfaces over this entire level that put stress on these video cards. It is important to note that in the past Preview we used the beginning part of this level from where the ship drops you off all the way through the halls till we got outside. This time however we are using a different part of this level. We are utilizing a manual run-through from outside in the snow over the ice in the Warthog with the headlights on. There are many mirrored bumped surfaces in this run putting the stress on the video cards.
Above are the in-game video settings we used for benchmarking. 1024x768 with everything in the game set to maximum values for graphics.
The very first thing that hits us with Halo is the performance of the Radeon 9500Pro here and that is most likely not a surprise considering its 8-pipe design compared to the 4 pipelines on the other three cards
The Radeon 9600XT is the next card that provides the next best performance in Halo. It dips down to 25FPS and maintains an average of 29. Next down the line is the BFG Asylum 5700Ultra. It is an improvement over the 5600Ultra in this game. The 5600Ultra bottoms out at 19FPS and the 5700Ultra at 23FPS. The average FPS on the 5700Ultra is more near 30FPS than the 5600Ultra is.