Benchmarks III
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We've seen that the ASUS is an effective performer in both synthetic and real OpenGL benchmarks, we've also seen that it does well in the synthetic DirectX benchmarks. Let's now see how it fares in a real DirectX benchmark with Commanche4. This DX8.1-compliant benchmark also adds complexity by using pixel and vertex shaders to good effect. Being a flight-sim game, it's is also heavily CPU-limited. All these factors should ensure that we receive some interesting results from our test cards. Firstly, no anti-aliasing or aniso filitering
Notice the lack of performance decrease, for the ASUS Ti 4600, as we scale the resolution ladder. We can only surmise that the video card is waiting for the CPU to feed it geometry. The Geforce3 Ti 500, on the other hand, is already the bottleneck at 1024x768x32 (40.45fps) and continues to be so as we move up the scale. Because the test is fundamentally CPU-limited, we see little increase in performance when the ASUS is overclocked to 318/740. Interestingly, conducting the same test with a 1600MHz P4 as opposed to a 2400MHz CPU gives us an average frame-rate of 33.11fps at 1024x768x32, further validating our CPU-limited theory. Let's see what effect 2x FSAA has on the results.
The ASUS Ti 4600, as expected, manages to almost replicate its performance at 1024x768x32 with 2x FSAA enabled. It still doesn't take a great hit until we benchmark 1600x1200x32, a resolution that proved too much for the Ti 500. Again, once the test becomes card-limited, overclocking pays dividends. Let's go up to 4x FSAA.
More of the same here. One peculiarity to the Geforce4 Ti 4xxx cards is the use of 4XS anti-aliasing. This is limited to D3D, however. The images produced with this AA are a notch up from that of 4x FSAA. Let's see how it is handled by the ASUS V8460. Obviously, the Geforce3 Ti 500 is not capable of producing 4XS benchmarks so it will be omitted for this test.
The results are around ~ 5% lower than simple 4x FSAA. The performance penalty is justified by slightly increased image quality. 37fps at1024x768x32 with 4XS FSAA is a sight to behold. Time to wrap it all up now as we move on to our concluding thoughts. |
