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- Date:
- Monday , January 19, 2004
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Albatron FX5900PV Review
The GeForceFX 5900s are out in force. With many different variations available, each company is creating new and unique designs to get your attention. We have Albatron’s latest on the testbench today.
Unreal Tournament 2003
(Direct3D)
A full installation of Unreal Tournament 2003 with patch 2225 was used. For our tests, we're using our own UT2003 Benchmarking utility version 2.1. Resolutions of 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200 were tested in Direct3D High Quality mode. Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic levels are noted where necessary.
For this game we have also created a custom timedemo. We recorded an intense multiplayer deathmatch session in DM-Oceanic map. Due to concerns of video card companies altering their drivers to perform better in specific demos, we will not be making this demo public.
First we will show you performance with the included and public flyby demos in Antalus, Inferno and Face3. These flyby’s are very good at showing how 3D video performance compares using the UT2003 graphics engine since there are no physics involved. The flybys are a very video card dependent benchmarking solution and scale well. Our custom timedemo, however, better reflects actual gameplay and the level of performance you can expect to get with this card in-game.
For the benchmarking of the custom timedemo the highest possible video quality settings were enabled for UT2003.
Before we dive into the performance in UT2003 we need to see if these new drivers have done anything different with the filtering in this game. If you recall a month ago some issues were brought up regarding filtering in UT2003 with 44.03 drivers. We examined those issues in our UT2003 Texture Filtering article. And shortly after that we again looked at this even further when we had to figure out how to compare a GFFX card with 44.03 drivers to the competition. Now that we are using a brand new driver set we need to take a quick look at filtering again to see if anything has changed in this game.
In the first shot above we are looking at a portion of a screenshot taken in the Antalus map from a spawn point. The top picture shows us what we see with the AF slider set to the “Application” setting with Trilinear enabled in the game. The shot below that shows us what 8X AF looks like when applied from the driver control panel. The bottom shot shows us what the image quality looks like when the AF slider is left on “Application” and the AF level is set in the UT2003.INI file.
We can see that 8X AF is being applied when we ask for it, but to see what is going on with the Trilinear Mip-Map filtering we must enable “firstcoloredmip 1” to highlight the mip-maps.
With the mip-maps highlighted we can now see what kind of filtering is going on here in the second picture above. It appears there isn’t much filtering going on between the mip-maps at any setting. It looks like “Application 8X AF” is exactly the same as setting 8X AF in the control panel.
Asbestos makes this a bit clearer to see what is happening. With the mip-map levels highlighted we can see that no matter what you set the driver or application to, NVIDIA is forcing a lessened form of Trilinear onto this game. So even with these new 45.23 drivers we are not getting the option of setting full Trilinear through the application if we want it. It leaves us scratching our heads here to what the “Application” setting on the AF slider really means. Apparently it says Application but it doesn’t really mean it. We do think that NVIDIA is doing a disservice to the enthusiast community by limiting our choices beyond what the game content developer obviously wanted the end user to have.
Judging performance by these flybys we see that the Albatron FX5900 card is strong up to 4XAA/8XAF in this system. Performance is above 30 FPS at all times even at 1600x1200. When 8XAA is applied the performance plummets. Comparing performance to the 9800 Pro we see that the 9800 Pro takes the lead when AA and AF are enabled in Antalus and Inferno. Only in Face3 does the Albatron take the lead at 2XAA/8XAF at 1280x1024 thanks to its higher memory bandwidth.