Looking Past the Present - Part 2
Last month, we took a look at what the GeForce 7900 series has to offer in terms of longevity. While the focus was on the GeForce 7900GTX, when we compared it to the Radeon X1900 series we found the latter to be more efficient. This and the number of shader processing units on the Radeon X1900 made us conclude that the Radeon X1900 is more 'futureproof' than the GeForce 7900. Even in old games, where the GeForce 7900GTX is faster in frame rates, it progressively lost more frame rate than the Radeon X1900XTX with higher resolution and AA / AF.In newer games, we found they're pretty much equal - the Radeon X1900XTX is much more efficient in some games, the GeForce 7900 in others. However, even we have to admit that the GeForce 7900GTX provides a higher frame rate than the Radeon X1900XTX in most of the games in our benchmark suite, at least in 1024 x 768 with AA and AF (F.E.A.R and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory). It also consistently offer slightly higher minimum frame rates, one thing gamers are very particular with. So, it looks like more testing is in order or at least more games. We need games that are more forward looking, utilizing a lot more shader processing power of these cards and less on texture processing. After much testing and retesting, we chose three other games that we think fit the bill.
Need for Speed: Most Wanted
The newest installment in the series continues the tradition started by Need for Speed: Underground - the liberal use of shaders. The game environment is similar to NFS:U 2, but with more destructible objects. ie buildings, construction site, fences etc. Most of the graphical settings in this game is not that different with its predecessors. During testing, we found we could actually push all but one setting to the max with newer cards, even with AA and AF up to 1600 x 1200.
As you can see, there is only one setting we kept to minimum - Car Reflection Update Rate. From what we've seen in the game, there's little difference between enabling and disabling this option. With this option set to minimum, we get much higher and sustainable frame rates throughout the entire game so we think this is an acceptable compromise since we don't really lose that much, visually. Since there's no saved replay, we resort to benchmarking a realtime cutscene. It's actually the first realtime cutscene in the game. There's both closeups and chase cam positions, not to mention several collisions, similar to what you find throughout gameplay.
Call of Duty 2
The long awaited patch for Call of Duty is finally here, bringing the award-winning game from developer Infinity Ward to version 1.2. This patch finally brings Punkbuster support to the game, in addition to fixes mostly related to dual core processors (patch 1.1 enables support for dual core processors). It's still somewhat hard to work with as a benchmark, but we think the hassle is worth the trouble. Graphically, the game is impressive and surprisingly, it's fast enough on a GeForce 4, though you need to turn down most graphical settings. For testing, we've decided to use a custom demo using the second level in the game - the 'Demolition' mission of the USSR campaign. This level features things you most likely see throughout the entire game: a mixture of outdoor and indoor levels, lots of AI and smokes / explosions.Below you'll see some screenshots we've taken using basically three set of settings - the first is with the number of dynamic lights set to 'Normal' and soften smoke edges set to 'World Only'. The second screenshot is with 'High' and 'Everything' for both settings, respectively. For the third screenshot, in addition to the latter, we change the texture settings from 'High' to 'Extra'. You can definitely see that 'Extra' settings adds much more detail with higher resolution normal and specular maps.
Obviously, you want to play with 'Extra' if you want the highest image quality. The number of dynamic lights and soften smoke edges settings is more subjective, you can enable them if you want, but there is performance penalty for each and it's hardly worth it in our opinion. There's no noticeable, let alone significant differences in image quality like we're seeing with the texture settings.
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