Comanche 4
The Comanche 4 benchmark looks good, uses a bunch of DirectX8 features, and is based on a real game.
A 3.2GHz P4 and a well-tuned Springdale is found wanting here. The geometry of the benchmark calls for a system of immense power.
Now the cards are becoming the bottleneck, as scores start to trail off. The Gainward card becomes the meat in the ATi sandwich.
We had hoped that the Gainward's superior clock speed would tell here. Could it be that NVIDIA's insistence of applying anisotropic filtering to the whole scene is handicapping the card here. ATi cards' algorithms simply pick and choose which surfaces require treatment and then decide just how much filtering will take place. NVIDIA's implementation may please purists to a greater degree, though ATi's methods are perfectly acceptable to most gamers.
