ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 and NVIDIA GeForce FX Go5650: Taking on DX9
by Andrew Ku on September 14, 2003 11:04 PM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Splinter Cell
We used Splinter Cell in the past briefly, but AA and AF aren’t recommended by the creator because of the way it was designed. Even so, the game is still very detailed and takes its toll on even the newest of hardware.
We ran the cards through all benchmark scenarios, but to avoid repetition, we will only include benchmark scores from two of the scenarios. As we push up the resolutions, the Mobility Radeon 9600 increases its 10% lead at 1024x768 by another 6%. At 1600x1200, this scenario hits sub 20fps for both graphics processor, and game play is, for the most part, unreasonable.
The largest difference between the two cards ended up being 28% at 1600x1200, but neither card ended up with sub 10fps scores in any of the scenarios.
We should note that the GeForce FX Go5650 was able to decrease the differential between the Mobility Radeon 9600 in one of the benchmark scenarios. However, the difference between the two only started at 6% at 1024x768, and ended up dropping to 3% at 1600x1200.
One glitch that we stumbled upon in this title was the interference of SpeedStep with the internal benchmark counter. With SpeedStep enabled, the game derives the wrong processor frequency, and therefore, reports the fps wrong. The developer has since been informed of this.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
47 Comments
View All Comments
Anonymous User - Monday, September 15, 2003 - link
That 30 FPS-eye-limit rubbish always comes up in these sort of threads - I can't believe there are people who think they can't tell the difference between a game running at 30 FPS and 60 FPS.Anyway, I'd like to ask about the HL2 benches - you mention the 5600 is supposed to drop down a code path, but don't specifically say which one was used in the tests. DX8? Mixed? The charts say "DX 9.0", so if that was indeed used then it's interesting from a theoretical point of view but doesn't actually tell us how the game will run on such a system, since the DX8 code path is recommmended by Valve for the 5200/5600.
Anonymous User - Monday, September 15, 2003 - link
The "car wheels not rotating right" effect is caused by aliasing, and you'll still get that effect even if your video card is running at 2000fps.Besides, you're limited by your monitor's refresh rate anyhow.
Anonymous User - Monday, September 15, 2003 - link
#14 that is incorrect and totally misleading. Humans can tell the difference up to about 60fps (sometimes a little more).Have you ever seen a movie where the car's tires dont seem to rotate right? Thats becuse at 29.97fps you notice things like that.
Anonymous User - Monday, September 15, 2003 - link
#13, unless your not human, the human eye cant see a difference at 30fps and up. 60fps is a goal for users cause at that point, even if there is a slow down to 30fps you cant see the difference.Anonymous User - Monday, September 15, 2003 - link
Overall, I liked the article...However, whilst I understand that you wanted to run everything at maximum detail to show how much faster one chipset may be than another, it would have been helpful if some lower resolution benchmarks could have been thrown in.
After all, what good does it do you to know that chip B may perform at 30fps whilst chip A performs at 10fps if both are unplayable?
I don't mind whether I can play a game at an astoundingly good detail level or not - I care more about whether I can play the game at all! :)
In the end, we'd all love to be able to play all our games in glorious mega-detail looks-better-than-real-life mode at 2000fps, but it's not always possible.
A big question should be can I play the game at a reasonable speed with a merely acceptable quality. And that's the sort of information that helps us poor consumers! :)
Thanks for your time and a great article.
Sxotty - Monday, September 15, 2003 - link
Um do you mean floating point (FP16) or 16bit color? As opposed to FP32 on the NV hardware, as ATI's doesn't even support FP32, which is not 32bit color. ATI supports FP24. LOL and the no fog thing was just funny, that is NV's fault it is not like it has to be dropped they did it to gain a tiny fraction of performance.rqle - Monday, September 15, 2003 - link
I really like this comment:"Don’t forget that programmers are also artists, and on a separate level, it is frustrating for them to see their hard work go to waste, as those high level settings get turned off."
Hope future article on graphic card/chipset will offer more insight on how the may developer feel.
Anonymous User - Monday, September 15, 2003 - link
please note: the warcraft benchmark was done under direct3d. now nvidia cards perform badly under direct 3d with warcraft whereas ati does a very fine job. it's a completely different story, however, if u start warcraft 3 with the warcraft.exe -opengl command. so please take note of that, only very few people about this anyway. my quadro 4 700 go gl gets about +10fps more under opgengl compared to d3d!Pete - Monday, September 15, 2003 - link
Nice read. Actually, IIRC, UT2003 is DX7, with some DX7 shaders rewritten in DX8 for minimal performance gains. Thus, HL2 should be not only the first great DX9 benchmark, but also a nice DX8(.1) benchmark as well.Anonymous User - Monday, September 15, 2003 - link
so valve let you guys test out half life 2 on some laptops eh? very nice. (great review to, well written)