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Performance

The test setup is pretty much the same like in our previous articles. AA and AF settings are applied in game, with image settings set to High Quality on the driver panel and no optimizations are enabled. Quake 4 was set to High Quality. Bilinear filtering was set with the command 'image_filter GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_NEAREST'. To evaluate antialiasing performance, we chose to use 4x AA, set with the command 'r_multisamples 4', while AF was set with 'image_anisotropy n', n being the number of samples. F.E.A.R was set to the usual settings, all details set to maximum, with the exception of soft shadows which was set to 'off'. System related settings (physics etc) was set to minimum.

We'd like to thank both Tagan and Kingston for supplying with the additional power supply and 1 GB memory modules for this article.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ socket 939
2 x 1024 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
MSI K8N NForce 4 SLI motherboard
ASUS GeForce 7800GTX DDR3 256 MB graphics card
(running at standard clocks - core 486 MHz / memory 675 MHz (1350 MHz effective))
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GB Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
NVIDIA Forceware 81.98 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 4 6.70 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
DirectX 9.0c

Performance

The results:

Quake 4

One glance at the results and you can see we're mostly system limited here. Only with AA and AF enabled did we see a significant difference in frame rates. Because of this, we will only be looking at AA and AF results from Quake 4. Now, let's look closely at the results with 4, 5 and 6 PS quads. You can use the table in the next page to see the numbers more clearly.

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