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Performance

Most of the games we tested today feature application controlled anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering. Only Battlefield 2 and Brothers In Arms have control for only one settings (AA in BF2 and AF in Brothers in Arms). We enable AA and AF in-game when possible, either through the menu or console command. For Battlefield 2, we enable anisotropic filtering through the driver panel and for Brothers in Arms, AA was again set through the driver panel. Image quality setting is changed to High Quality for best image quality, thus no user controllable optimizations were enabled. This time, we set transparency AA to off (a more in depth look will be featured in the next article). Testing are done using Forceware 81.94, since we've already finished testing before the 81.95 came out. 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
NVIDIA Forceware 81.94 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 4 6.66 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
DirectX 9.0c

The results:

Looks like you really have to use at least a GeForce 7800GTX if you want to play F.E.A.R with AA and AF. The WinFast PX7800GTX TDH with reference clock can only managed to get a minimum 30 fps. The higher clocked 7800GTX fares slightly better (2-3 fps faster). The 7800GTX is of course slower, reaching minimum fps of 25 fps. So, if you want to play F.E.A.R with AA and AF, you better be ready to pay lots of money, either for the GeForce 7800GTX (or even the newly launched 7800GTX 512 MB) or an SLI setup with either GeForce 6800GT or 6800GT (or the upcoming 7800GS). All GeForce 6 and 7 series just lose too much performance in F.E.A.R with AA and AF enabled (at least 50%) and that's not good.


In Quake 4, we see a slightly better picture. All of these cards can still push high frame rates with AA and AF in 1024 x 768. But again when we up the resolution to 1280 x 1024, we began to see the same 50% performance drop. Thankfully the minimum frame rates are still high enough for comfortable gameplay. The GeForce 7800GT is beginning to buck under the strain here, dropping to the minimum 30 fps mark. At 1600 x 1200, the strain proves to be too much even for the higher clocked 7800GTX, so it's safe to say you can only play comfortably at maximum 1280 x 1024 with AA and AF in Quake 4 with these cards.

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