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If you've seen a recent graphics card review of mine at Hexus, you'll have spotted the 4-graph format I've moved to recently. It covers 3 benchmark bases, 1024x768, 1024x768 with 4xAA and 8xAF and 1600x1200 with 4x and 8xAF. Then there's a performance drop graph that gives an overview of what just happened in the 3 graphs.
This lets us get a base look, a look at what happens when we turn on a reasonable set of IQ enhancements, finally followed by a card busting push to 1.92 million textured, sampled, filtered and lit pixels to really test memory bandwidth and pixel horsepower.
So, without further ado, here's the base 3DMark 2001SE graph. What we're looking out for in all graphs is where it benchmarks in relation to the 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro boards, along with the PD discussion at the bottom of the page to sum it all up.
3DMark 2001SE is the first benchmark in my reviews simply because it generally sets you up nicely with regards to what to expect from the rest of the benchmarks. It's a reasonable representation of current game performance, despite the furore around Futuremark benchmarks with NVIDIA cards, and all the other benchmarks usually follow the same pattern. What we see here, in base form, is FX 5900 not being allowed to stretch its theoretical legs, at least with IQ off to start with. It's got more power than 9800 Pro, but it can't exploit that in a 3DMark 2001SE, DirectX 8, style benchmark. We'll turn on IQ then.
4x anti aliasing and 8x aniso, the MSI gets into its stride. Intellisample HCT gets a workout, it gets to throw its memory bandwidth advantage around and it generally makes a nuisance of itself.
What about the bump in pixel count?
Swings and roundabouts, it can't quite maintain an advantage in the case where it has to move nearly 2.5x the pixels than the previous test. Out PD graph will tell us what's going on, so we don't have to guess.
It suffers the least when we put IQ on, something to be commended, but the driver and hardware can't handle the tougher test at the end. So far, it's benchmarking somewhere between 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro, depending on how you like your image quality and resolution. Given that 1024x768 with 4xAA and 8xAF is a reasonable setting to play games with, I'm tempted to say it's faster than 9800 Pro. But not yet, we've still got 5 more benchmarks to play with. Let's try another.
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