|
Like I said in the MSI review, I like to start with 3DMark 2001SE since it tends to set the tone for the rest of a graphics card article. Base graph first.
Look how far apart the two FX 5900's are, shocking behavoir from identical hardware eh? But we're not too bothered about base performance, we're IQ junkies (and so should you be after forking out the wrong side of £275 for one), so let's turn on some antialiasing to make things look oh so smooth, along with a large dollop of 8 sample anistropic filtering, for extra texture detail.
We only lose around 4000 marks on the high end cards here (the midrange FX5600 Ultra loses a fair chunk more), so we can be confident of having the fillrate and memory bandwidth headroom for good performance in the rest of the tests, save maybe Code Creatures. On to the pixel heavy test at 1600x1200 for an express lesson in how to eat up as much texture fillrate as possible.
Ouch, ~50% drops on all of the high end equipment, meaning the cards are working hard and our CPU is sat twiddling its silicon thumbs. The PD graph will sum it all up.
The Radeon's are more efficient when moving to the high pixel test, but the high end NV35 drive boards are more at home as we initially turn on our IQ options. None of the 4 high end models on test are slow, that's for sure. Another test, to confirm our early findings.
|
