Date:
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Gigabyte R96X and NV57U Review

Step inside as we take a look at Gigabyte’s latest mainstream cards the R96X (9600XT) and N57U (5700U). We pit them head to head examining gameplay experience in eight games with some surprising results.

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Halo: Combat Evolved

(DirectX 9)

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These are the video settings in game that we found best suited to run Halo on these two cards.

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. The manual run-through is done at a point in the game that focuses more on the graphics rather than the physics engine of the game. There are lots of mirrored bumped surfaces and specular over this entire level that put stress on these video cards.

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We first tried 1024x768 with noaa/noaf on both cards and played through a few missions. What we really found was that performance was just too slow at times. We found 800x600 to perform much better with these cards in this game. We found that 800x600 with noaa/noaf on the N57U were the best settings in this game with a minimum fps of 37 in our test sequence. With the R96X we were able to enable Anisotropic filtering at 4X and still get very smooth performance in this game. If you look at the graph you will see that even at 4XAF the R96X is pulling in better performance than the N57U with no AF. So here is a scenario where the R96X has better image quality than the competition and also higher performance in a demanding game.

Max Payne 2

(DirectX 9)

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These are the settings we used on both cards. You will note everything is set to the highest quality and Antialiasing is selected from within the game options.

We used FRAPS frame counter and MP2's Part II Chapter 3 (Condemned Building cont'd) for our framerate evaluation. We used a repeatable manual run-throughs in this level. Part II Chapter 3 has a lot of particle, explosion and fire effects in it making for an intense graphic experience, in fact probably the most intensive graphic burden in this game making it a worse-case-scenario.

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In Max Payne 2 we found 1024x768 with 2XAA and 8XAF to be the highest playable settings on both cards. The R96X bottoms out at 39FPS and the N57U at 30FPS. We did try both cards at higher resolutions with AA disabled and the AF level lowered to give acceptable performance. However, we found the aliasing to be very noticeable, so it was better to run this game at a lower resolution and have AA and AF enabled.