Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT (NVIDIA FX 5950 Ultra)
Real-world gaming applications
From synthetic applications, we are now moving on to analyzing the performance of the graphic boards in real gaming applications.
Unreal Tournament 2003
In the most comfortable mode (no antialiasing and anisotropy enabled), we can see a customary leadership of NVIDIA boards at this test. However, like in 3DMark 2003 we can see some strange anomalies at 1024x768x32. And only Gigabyte GV-N595U-GT again brings NVIDIA to leadership thus justifying the name of the fastest board of the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra class.
The antialiasing modes do not bring us anything new in the alignment of forces except the more realistic situation at 1024x768x32.
In the AF mode, NVIDIA again loses. The analysis of AF quality is beyond the scopes of this article, so we have to be content with the figures produced with these accelerators.
Finally, the most demanding mode (AF+AA) shows a leadership of the board based on ATI Radeon 9800XT. The faster anisotropy in ATI does add much to the results.
Unreal II: The Awakening
ATI boards demonstrate a traditional leadership at this benchmark. NVIDIA's boards on GeForce FX 5950 Ultra lag behind quite substantially.
Call Of Duty
In this latest OpenGL game we can see a sure leadership of ATI boards. It's quite strange considering the traditional commitment of NVIDIA boards to OpenGL products.
As we expected, the modes of combined AF+AA do not bring anything new.
X2: The Threat
The "Ultra Shadow" technology implemented in NVIDIA chips allow them easily bypassing ATI boards in this test. Due to this technology, stencil shades whose rendering technology is widely used in the game are built faster. Similar effects will be used in future DooM II, so some assumptions of the alignment of forces among the graphic accelerators in Carmack's creature can already be made right now.
Final Fantasy XI Official Benchmark 2
Unfortunately, we haven't got any information on the engine of this benchmark, so we can only assert the leadership ATI boards at it.
AquaMark 3
At that, we see a slight superiority of Sapphire Radeon 9800XT board relative to NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. And that is under unforgivably low operation of version 2.0 pixel shaders in synthetic tests for NVIDIA boards...
Gun Metal Benchmark 2
At that, NVIDIA boards feel comfortably enough, despite the unforgivably low operation with DirectX 9.0 shaders which play not the last part here albeit not used to the full.
HALO: Combat Evolved
In a real-world gaming application that uses version 2.0 shaders (we invoked their forced use via the game's command line), NVIDIA boards lose. But as the resolutions go up, the difference is graded.
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness
The game appeared in sales quite a long time ago, but are able to test it as part of our testing toolkit only now.
For tests, we used 3 recorded demo benchmarks:
• Paris5_4;
• Paris1c;
• Paris2g.
In our tests, we used the defaults settings for boards built on both ATI and NVIDIA chips.
Tomb Raider engine: Angel of Darkness is a technically advanced DirectX 9.0 solution. The game uses version 2.0 pixel and vertex shaders, which, considering the results of synthetic tests, is not going to bring anything good for NVIDIA boards. Nevertheless, let's look at the figures.
Yes, it seems like NVIDIA boards do quite a poor job handling vertex 2.0 shaders in real-world applications, but not in overly optimized benchmarks. This test is remarkable in that the benchmark is saturated with effects based on version 2.0 pixel programs. This is the reason why NVIDIA boards show low frame-rate. Also note that the results for NVIDIA boards can't be regarded valid in this test because of the problems with the rendering. In particular, there are problems with shadows display at the start of the test scene. This bug was fixed in version 52 patch, but the benchmark functionality was excluded from there, so we have to take readings using version 49.
This test is abundant with shaders in the less extent than in the previous, nevertheless this does not allow NVIDIA boards to take a lead.
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