Bechmarks - Aliens vs. Predator
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Review: HEXUS.net/qawcl | Where2buy: amazon.co.uk |
The standalone Aliens vs. Predator benchmark uses DX11 features such as hardware tessellation and advanced shadow sampling to draw and animate everyone's favourite xenomorph.
Here is an interesting result; the ASUS card is no faster than reference. We ran the test multiple times, on both cards, and the graphed-up scores are correct. The only plausible reason is that the GTX 650 Ti is fundamentally starved of memory bandwidth. It uses a 128-bit-wide memory bus allied to chips running at just 5,400MHz, producing 86.4GB/s of potential bandwidth. Increasing the core speed has no meaningful effect without also increasing the memory speed.
Underscoring this thinking that memory-bandwidth limitations are hampering performance, we manually overclocked the RAM from 5,400MHz to 6,000MHz and the 1,920x1,080-resolution score rose from 26.7fps to 29.1fps. Even so, the score is some way behind a last-gen Radeon HD 6870 and presently-available HD 7850.
