Benchmarks II
Let's now focus on a game that has certainly caught our attention of late. Serious Sam 2, The Second Encounter, is a visually stunning first-person-shooter with an excellent benchmarking mode. As this is a very real game, we'll go into the benchmarks in a little greater detail. We'll consider what effects anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering have at each resolution.
We'll be benchmarking the Sierra De Chiapas demo, one that is included in the publicly available demonstration version of SS2. Quality setting are enabled. However, the standard anisotropic filtering is switched off till we need it.
Firstly no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering
The results from the Vulpine benchmark are closely mirrored here. We've given due praise to the MSI G4Ti4600-VTD's anti-aliasing potential. Let's now see it in action at 2x AA.
Notice how slight the difference is between no AA and 2x AA at 1024x768x32. The MSI Ti 4600 barely takes a hit, whilst the Ti 500 gets savagely hurt at each resolution.
Let's have a look at 4x anti-aliasing.
Even the Ti 4600 cannot run at 4x AA without taking a reasonable hit in performance. Still, 50 fps, at 1280x1024x32, with 4x AA applied, is a joy to behold. Out Ti 500 simply couldn't run at 1600x1200x32 with 4x FSAA. We've previously stated that overclocking hasn't been of great use. Anti-aliasing, with 4x applied, is completely card limited. Therefore, overclocking the GPU will bring about worthwhile gains. We can see the 1280x1024x32 figure rising from 45.3 to 50.5 FPS respectively.
Let's have a look at anisotropic filtering. Anisotropic filtering offers much crisper textures when compared to bilinear and trilinear filtering. By employing varying degrees of anisotropic filtering, textures remain crisper as you look further and further into the distance. This visual enhancement is delivered at a cost, though.
Let's have a look at performance under 4-tap anisotropic filtering.
Anisotropic filtering has always exacted a large performance hit with NVIDIA cards, this still seems to be the case. Our previous graphs have shown the MSI Ti 4600 to be significantly faster than the Ti 500, here we see that it is faster, but only faster through sheer clock speed.
We'll finish off looking at Serious Sam 2 with a setting that I personally favour. 2x anti-aliasing together with 2-tap anisotropic filtering.
Excellent visuals with acceptable frame rates. The MSI G4Ti4600-VTD really does come into its own here by virtually doubling the Ti 500's results.
Let's now have a look at performance under Quake 3.
