Benchmarks II
Now for some in-depth investigation into how the ABIT OTES Ti 4200 performs with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. We'll have a look at the Sierra De Chiapas demo within Serious Sam 2. Run at quality settings.
We're pretty much CPU limited at 1024x768x32 as scores from a standard GeForce4 Ti 4200 and the all-powerful Radeon 9700 Pro are similar. Fill-rate limitations cut in at 1280 and above.
Now on to 2x F.S.A.A and 4x anisotropic filtering. Smoothed jaggies and increased texture quality give us a visual delight, but at the cost of pure performance.
The OTES, along with the other Ti series of cards, shows its weakness when anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering is thrown into the mix. Still, we can play this demo at the 1024 resolution with these settings. Incidentally, I found that the Radeon's scores had dropped between 5 - 10% with the driver change from Catalyst 2.2 to 2.3.
Now on to a visual treat with 4x anti-aliasing and 8-tap anisotropic filtering. This looks absolutely gorgeous, but will it play well ?.
It may look great but this level of image enhancement makes games-playing difficult at 1024x768x32. I could see the demo stutter and lag a few times; it only got worse at 1280. I couldn't run this level of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering at 1600, however.
Incidentally, the Radeon's scores, although impressive in comparison, are quite a bit down when compared to using the Catalyst 2.2 drivers. Reinstalling them saw a marked increase in performance using the same settings. I have a suspicion that the 2.2 drivers weren't applying the settings correctly.
