Benchmarks II
Thus far, we've used synthetic benchmarks to demonstrate the power of the Creative Ti 4600. The 128MB of video memory certainly plays a part in ensuring decent performance at higher resolutions. The larger textures generated require more processing memory, something the Creative has in spades.
Synthetic benchmarks are excellent tools for quantifying performance, but don't give us an exact idea of how it will play in today's games. Games engines are inherently different. Let's now focus on one of the most popular and card-taxing games available today, Serious Sam, The Second Encounter.
Not only is Serious Sam 2 a gorgeous first-person-shooter, it also has an excellent benchmark mode. As this is a very real game, we're going to go into the benchmarks with a little more detail and investigate what effect varying degrees of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering have on overall performance.
We're using the publicly available Serious Sam 2 demo, so that you can compare results if you so wish. We're also using the Sierra De Chiapas demo with quality settings enabled. We've purposely disabled inbuilt anisotropic filtering until we need to use it. Enough methodology, on to the benchmarks.
Again, the Geforce3 Ti 500 is able to keep some sort of parity with the Ti 4600 at 1024x768x32, we guess that the Creative Ti 4600 simply isn't receiving enough geometry data from the CPU. The barely higher overclocked score of 130.1 FPS seems to corroborate this finding. Much like before, the extra bandwidth muscle puts daylight between itself and the Ti 500. The Creative Ti 4600 seems to pull out an astonishing 48% lead over the Ti 500 at 1600x1200x32.
Let's now focus on anti-aliasing. Those with smaller monitors, whose native resolution is 1024x768x32, will definitely be interested to see how the Creative Ti 4600 copes with AA. Firstly 2x FSAA.
Look up to the non-AA results to see the relative closeness of the Ti 500 to the Creative Ti 4600 at 1024x768x32. With anti-aliasing applied, the CPU is no longer a major determining factor of performance, the onus is on the efficiency of the anti-aliasing logic.
What's almost astounding is the fact that the Creative Ti 4600 can virtually deliver the same performance, with 2 x FSAA, at 1024x768x32. The Ti 500 takes a reasonable hit. Even at 1280, the performance is admirable, with the overclocked Ti 4600 doubling the performance from the Geforce3 Ti 500. Here we have what we've been striving for, excellent frame rates coupled with sublime visuals. Let's really give the cards a good thrashing by raising the anti-aliasing to 4x.
We continue to see the Creative Ti 4600 putting in an impressive performance. 80fps at 1024 is impressive when you consider the amount of work being done by the GPU. We were pleasantly surprised to see 4x FSAA working at 1600x1200x32, it may have been slow but there wasn't a jagged edge in sight. The Ti 500 simply couldn't cut it at this resolution and AA level.
We've seen the Creative Ti 4600 scoff at our attempts to humble it with FSAA, let's now investigate what effect anisotropic filtering has on performance. Anisotropic filtering attempts to apply the best possible texture to uneven shapes, such as angled surfaces and walls. It goes beyond Trilinear filtering as that relies on only sampling a square. Because the sampled surface is uneven, a great many calculations have to be carried to determine the best texture application. It usually incurs a large performance hit. We'll try 4x anisotropic filtering on our Serious Sam 2 benchmark.
Effective anisotropic filtering has always incurred a large performance penalty, the situation is no different here. The Creative Ti 4600 boasts a refined anti-aliasing logic but the anisotropic filtering logic has remained intact from the Geforce3 series of cards. It's able to defeat the Ti 500 through sheer brute force alone. The gaps are nowhere near as large here. The fact that at 1600x1200x32, the overclocked Ti 4600 falls from 87 FPS to 35 FPS with the inclusion of 4x anisotropic filtering, is simply too great a performance hit. It looks good but becomes rather unplayable.
Let's conclude our SS2 benchmarks by considering what is for some an optimum setting, 2x anti-aliasing coupled with 2x anisotropic filtering. This should and does produce excellent images.
Here we see the Creative Ti 4600 performing at its best, we have playable framerates coupled with exemplary image quality. 60 FPS+ at 1280x1024x32 with 2x FSAA and 2x anisotropic filtering says it all. It literally is twice as fast as the Ti 500 at these settings.
