Benchmarks III
We'll now visit Quake 3 and conduct the same series of anti-aliasing and anisotropic benchmarks. Quake 3 is still a game many of us enjoy today. We feel there is little need for commentary between the graphics, the graphs should illustrate the speed differentials well enough. We'll be using v1.30 with high quality settings enabled at each resolution.
Firstly, no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering.
Just a quick comment here, notice how overclocking the Ti 4600 pays literally no dividends at 1024, again the benchmark appears to be almost wholly CPU-limited. Overclocking the card pays greater dividends as we slowly become card-limited. The Ti 500 puts up a reasonable showing here. Now 2x anti-aliasing.
The ever so impressive Creative flexes its muscles once again as anti-aliasing is enabled. Let's see if 4x FSAA can seriously dampen the performance of the Ti 4600.
Our poor Ti 500 gave up the ghost after 1024x768x32 with 4x FSAA. Even if we enabled 4x, we would receive results that mirrored 2x FSAA for both 1280 and 1600 resolutions. The Ti 4600 continues to steamroller the Ti 500 into submission. Let's see how the cards handle our optimum settings of 2x AA and 2x aniso.
118.6 FPS at 1280x1024x32 with 2x FSAA and 2x anisotropic filtering seems to be the sweet spot as far as the Creative Ti 4600 is concerned. Quake 3 never looked so good or played so well.
Let's now focus our attention to a new benchmark in the form of Comanche 4, a DX8.1 complaint helicopter simulation that is almost unique in the fact that it uses both vertex and pixel shading. Flight sims are noted for requiring the use of anti-aliasing at lower resolutions. They also tend to be rather CPU-limited, too. The Comanche benchmark extrapolates the average frames per seconds from a feature-packed helicopter mission. On to the numbers.
Here is where see the power of the Creative card in an indirect way. As we have mentioned before, flight simulations encompass huge landscapes and vast terrains, placing the onus on the CPU to feed the video card.
The fact that the Creative Ti 4600 loses only a few percent in peformance when going from 1024x768x32 to 1600x1200x32 is testament to its sheer power and 128MB of on-board memory. Huge textures, as generated at 1600x1200, require large buffers. That's why the Creative Ti 4600, blessed with 128MB of memory, is able to run without taking too great a performance hit. It almost makes the benchmark CPU-limited at 1600x1200x32. The Ti 500, on the other hand, with only 64MB of on-board memory, gets hurt quite quickly, it's certainly not what I would call playable at the higher resolutions. A faster host processor would certainly help in this case. Let's see what effect anti-aliasing has on the results.
The excellent anti-aliasing logic once again on show. I purposely sat through the numbers and have to say that 1280x1024x32 with 2x FSAA looked impressive, it was smooth with 40 FPS+ average framerates. What this benchmark once again highlights is that FSAA really does start to severely hurt the Geforce3 Ti 500, it couldn't complete the benchmark at 1600x1200x32 with 2x FSAA enabled. The Creative, once again, demonstrates that pure power and Full Screen Anti-Aliasing is its forte. Let's finish off by seeing what effect 4x FSAA has on the results.
What's almost remarkable here is the relatively small loss incurred at 1024 with 4x FSAA enabled, down from 48 FPS to 39 FPS. The huge 128MB of on-board memory plays a pivotal role in this benchmark. As expected, the Ti 500 refused to run at 1600x1200x32 with 4x FSAA enabled. We were unable to use anisotropic filtering successfully with the Comanche 4 benchmark, no doubt the results would have been similar those derived from Serious Sam 2.
