ATi RADEON - The Empire strikes back (8/15) Benchmarks - Descent 3
Descent 3 supports Direct 3D, OpenGL and Glide in 16 bit color. The game is also strongly optimized for 3DNow!, as you can easily tell from the benchmark results of the Athlon 700. The V5 5500 returned some very strange and inconsistent results under Glide. In 1280x1024 it was supposedly faster than in 1024x768!? So make of these results what you will, but take them with a grain of salt. The 3DNow! optimization of this game is truly remarkable! In D3D the Athlon 700 actually beats the PIII 1GHz system across the board!!!
In Direct3D, the GeForce2 and the RADEON are pretty much on the same level. The Voodoo 5 shows a surprising performance drop, especially at 1600x1200. In OpenGL, the RADEON isn’t able to keep up the pace and falls behind the GeForce2 boards. Overall, all cards score noticeably higher in OpenGL than under D3D. All but the Voodoo5, that is. The scores for OpenGL are barely higher than those for D3D. As I said before, the Glide results seem rather inconsistent with reality or at least with my expectations, as we see higher scores under 1280x1024 than under 1024x768 (or even 800x600). Maybe a problem of setting resolutions in Glide?!
The Athlon system has a surprise for us. In Direct 3D, ATi’s youngest creation is faster than both of the GeForce2 boards. It is, by the way, also faster than in the PIII system, which theoretically has a 300MHz clockspeed advantage! This just goes to show what a good SIMD optimization (in this case 3DNow! ) can do for a game. OpenGL doesn’t seem to benefit from this as much, and we see the GF2’s retake the lead, with the RADEON not too far off. The distance between these boards is actually smaller in this system than in the 1GHz box. Not much has changed as far as the V5 is concerned either – still the same strange results under Glide, too....
In the GHz system, the GeForce2 boards are once again leading the rest of the field. Overall there aren’t any surprises, then. The RADEON’s performance is nearly equal to the GF2’s under D3D, but falls behind a bit in OpenGL. Once again, the D3D performance in the Athlon system is quite remarkable. I still don’t know what to make of the V5 Glide results, though. Nonetheless, The V5 was very clearly the fastest card in Descent 3. |
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| Copyright: 07.08.2000 -
RIVA
Station 2000 - Lars Weinand Translation by Benjamin Kraft URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/radeon64_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-) |
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