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Quake 4

Quake 4 needs no introduction. The game uses the same engine as Doom 3 (but with larger environments) and also features a built in timedemo function. Unfortunately, as of the moment, timedemo replay is plagued by a bug causing some objects and textures to disappear during replay (you can read about it here). So, alas, we can't use a timedemo - the results will not be even close to gameplay. After much deliberation, we settle for the next best thing - playing the game in a repeatable manner and record the results with FRAPS. We settled on using the single player level - Data Processing Terminal. The results we're getting is consistent and there's lots of smokes, explosions and even some heat haze present. However, we have to remind you that this level is not really representative of the whole game. Basically, there's only yourself and the (huge!) tower guard that's casting dynamic shadows. If you remember, shadows is a big part of the Doom 3 engine. They're still present, but not in (over) abundance. Think of this as a temporary solution, until Raven (or id) release a patch to fix the timedemo replay.

Serious Sam II

The third newest game to our benchmark suite is no stranger to the fps crowd, or the general gaming crowd for that matter. Who doesn't remember the kamikaze bomber? We'll Sam is back courtesy of the people from CroTeam, with a new upgraded engine. Unlike the last two games, Serious Sam II uses Direct3D with some new effects such as parallax mapping and HDR rendering support. We've decided to use a customized 'High' settings - we turn off anti aliasing and set anisotropic filtering to 0 for default testing and set AA to medium and anisotropic filtering to 16x for AA and AF performance testing. We left HDR off, since this feature will only work on SM 3.0 cards. So, the settings should provide nearly identical image from both cards.



Serious Sam II features a built in benchmarking tool and several demos, we chose the Greendale demo since it has the heaviest graphics load (and of course lots and lots of enemies, explosions, grass and smoke). Just like F.E.A.R, we ran the built in timedemo function and compare the results to FRAPS,. Again the results are nearly identical, within 1 fps of each other.

Performance

Since all these games feature application controlled anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering, we enable these settings in-game, either through the menu or console command. With application controlled anisotropic filtering, the MIP levels used by both cards should be fairly close and any difference in image quality is kept to a minimum. We did took some screenshots, but they're pretty similar so we chose to not display then (now). Performance testing using older drivers (Forceware 66.93) does not seem to indicate any optimizations in filtering or shader optimization in Forceware 81.85 (in other words, the results are identical). Without further ado, here are the results.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ socket 939
2 x 256 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
MSI K8N NForce 4 SLI motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
450 watts ATX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 5.10 reference driver
NVIDIA Forceware 81.85 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 4 6.66 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
DirectX 9.0c

The results:

As you can see, performance between the game's medium and our custom settings is very close, and of course not noticeable in gameplay. The Radeon X800XL seems a little bit slower, but its still within the standard deviation of 2 fps between each run. The GeForce 6800GT is the better card here, partly because it can provide higher fps without AA and AF. The Radeon X800XL is still able to provide decent frame rates, but it's undeniably the slower card. With AA and AF enabled, both cards are neck to neck, but the frame rates are too low to have an enjoyable experience. A shame really, penalty with AA and AF on the GeForce 6800GT is just too much.

	GeForce 6800GT		Radeon X800XL
	Default	4x AA 16x AF	Default	4x AA 16x AF
<30 fps	0	23	0	22
30-45 fps	3	21	16	24
45-60 fps	23	5	19	5
60-90 fps	19	6	14	4
90-120 fps	6	0	6	0

By looking at the fps progress graph and the table above, we can see where each card spends the most time in the test. Without AA and AF, the GeForce 6800GT spends the most time between 45-90 fps while the Radeon X800XL spends most of its time evenly spread out between 30 to 90 fps.We can see, the lower frame rates occurred during the firefight sequence, thankfully the Radeon can still provide playable frame rates. Now, if we look at performance with AA and AF, we can actually see the Radeon spending more time (3 seconds worth) in 30 - 45 fps compared to the GeForce 6800GT. However, frame rates are too low, so we don't recommend using AA and AF with this game on both cards.

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