UT2003, Serious Sam 2, Code Creatures
UT2003 next, keep in mind the preliminary pattern we've seen.
• 1024x768 - -0.49%
• 1280x1024 - 24.93%
• 1600x1200 - 29.11%
Identical performance (can we declare a half percentage point difference a win for the Ti4600?) at 1024x768 and then the Radeon 9700 Pro really starts to show Ti4600 who's boss. Lots of texture data flying around and a decent polygon count means the Radeon can go to work at high resolution with HyperZ and pixel fillrate helping.
Interesting to note the Botmatch scores being very similar since you are CPU bound in those cases, but no graph for you.
Serious Sam 2 next.
• 1024x768 - -0.92%
• 1280x1024 - 7.48%
• 1600x1200 - 18.87%
Much the same happening here. A 1% win for Ti4600 at 1024x768, not that much in it at 1280x1024 and then nearly 20% at 1600x1200. Less than 20% at 1600x1200 and a close run at 1280x1024 means that we are aren't so card limited as with UT2003. Still, same principles apply with regards to the Radeon's superior memory performance and they explain the win.
Code Creatures to round off the formal benchmarks before we look at anti aliasing and texture filtering.
• 1024x768 - 25.83%
• 1280x1024 - 27.12%
• 1600x1200 - 22.92%
A completely different set of results this time with an anomalous 1280x1024 case and back to front ordering. I ran the numbers again to make sure, the same ball park area for the rerun so we'll take the results as gospel on the test hardware. So what's going on here? Either an optimised 1280x1204 case in the Radeon driver (unlikely) or just the wind blowing in the right direction today. Either way, 22%+ lead for the Radeon at all resolutions means that Code Creatures really tests shader performance and memory bandwidth. If it's texturing a lot too, Radeon should do better since it can do 16 texture ops per clock but Code Creatures seems shader heavy rather than texture heavy.
On to the anti aliasing and texture filtering analysis.
