ForceWare 52.16: NVIDIA's retaliation
Benchmarking Results: Real gaming applications
From synthetic applications, we are now moving on to analyzing the performance of the graphic boards in real gaming applications. Like in the part of the review dealing with synthetic tests, the set of benchmarking applications has undergone some changes. First off, this applies to the safely "leaked online" beta-version of Half-Life 2 whose test results, in our opinion, would be very interesting for our readers. We have also added a nice benchmark based on the engine used in the soon released Final Fantasy XI game.
Unreal Tournament 2003
To start with, it is curious to look at the results produced from applications that do not make active use of shaders, among them is just Unreal Tournament 2003. At low resolution with Detonator 45.23, the Asus board built on the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 chip lags behind Sapphire board built on the ATI Radeon 9800. But installation of the NVIDIA ForceWare 52.16 driver brings its benefits, and the boards are already on par. At higher resolutions, NVIDIA's board holds leadership at both versions of the drivers. The performance boost attained due to the change of NVIDIA driver at high resolution is much lower than in the low resolution.
X2: The Threat Demo
In this benchmark, even without installation of a new driver, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 traditionally beats ATI's counterpart. The thing is the benchmark uses a huge number of stenciled shadows which on NVIDIA boards require fewer passes and DO NOT use pixel and vertex programs, which creates an ideal environment for NVIDIA chips. The performance boost achieved due to the installation of a driver with the revised compiler is quite noticeable and increases the gap between the ATI counterpart.
Unreal II: The Awakening
This fresher revised version of the Unreal Tournament 2003 engine used in the game Unreal II: The Awakening demonstrates the leadership of ATI's board. This is most likely caused by the more complex geometry in the game. The new driver does not fix the situation, but noticeably reduces the gap at least in the most "playable" resolution to date. At higher resolution, ATI's board built on Radeon 9800 is unattainable for NVIDIA GPU's.
Final Fantasy XI Official Benchmark 2
This is a new test in our set of benchmarks. As far as we know, the gaming engine uses neither pixel nor vertex programs of whatever versions. But since there is no officially approved information regarding that, our doubts and surmises will remain unsolved, and we'll go on worrying about the inability to find out the explanation of why ATI Radeon 9800 board beat NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 =), while ForceWare 52.16 added much more score points in the test to ASUS V9950 board.
AquaMark 3
This is a very indicative shader benchmark to date, which gave food to loose talk regarding the optimizations both from NVIDIA and (!) ATI.
The results themselves create quite a dramatic situation for the ATI board. With Detonator 45.23, ASUS V9950 based on NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 loses to the Canadian counterpart, but installation of the most recent NVIDIA ForceWare 52.16 drivers gives NVIDIA's offspring a substantial performance boost which is more than enough to leave ATI well behind.
We are also presenting for your judgment some screenshots with detailed results of this test so that to analyze the results for each of the video cards tested.
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| FX 5900 - Detonator 45.23 |
Radeon 9800 - Catalyst 3.9 |
FX 5900 - ForceWare 52.16 |
It's interesting to note that one of the most demanding tests in the "Large Scale Vegetation Rendering" package practically didn't respond to the change of the driver, nor did the "Massive Overdraw" test. The following tests proved to be the most sensitive to the change of the driver with the compiler code revised: "Dynamic Occlusion Culling", "Masked Environment Mapping" and "Large Scale Terrain Rendering" which showed a performance boost as high as 22% on the average.
Gun Metal Benchmark 2
In this pseudo-DirectX 9.0 benchmark that uses vertex programs of version 2.0 along with version 1.1 of pixel programs, the alignment of forces is not that straightforward. In low resolutions, the ATI board outperforms NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 with Detonator 45.23 at both gaming tests at a small gap, but ForceWare 52.16 improves the situation. At high resolution, on the other hand, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 with both old and new version of the driver outperforms ATI Radeon 9800. Note that the performance boost attained due to the replacement of drivers is negligible, which is a bit strange considering that synthetic tests showed practically identical performance boost for both version 1.1 and version 2.0 pixel programs, so we can't attribute the small percentage in performance gain to the transition from Detonator 45.23 to ForceWare 52.16 and explain it by that the benchmark uses version 1.1 pixel programs, not 2.0.
HALO: Combat Evolved
It was interesting for us to follow the results of this regular DirectX 9.0 game in our list of benchmarks solely due to its possibility to forcedly enable whatever version of pixel and vertex programs in the game.
On the whole, the situation of the ATI board is as dramatic as it is for the case of AquaMark 3. With version 45.23, GeForce FX 5900 loses to ATI Radeon 9800, but ForceWare 52.16 comes in handy, and the situation radically changes both after using version 1.1 pixel programs and version 2.0 of the programs.
Another fact is also remarkable. If we look at the absolute FPS values for ATI Radeon 9800 using pixel and vertex programs of versions 2.0 and 1.1, we can see that the performance drop during transition from version 1.1 pixel and vertex programs to version 2.0 is quite insignificant. With NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 using Detonator 45.23, the drop is there and it is quite essential. But once we estimate the figures produced with ForceWare 52.16, we can claim absolutely the same (in terms of percentage) performance drop during transition from version 1.1 to version 2.0 of pixel and vertex programs in NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 as that seen in ATI Radeon 9800, which again is indicative of excellent job the programmers at NVIDIA have done. In fairness though, it's worth noting that we haven't noticed any slightest difference in quality in using both versions of pixel and vertex programs.
Half-life 2 Leaked Beta
I think it won't be an overstatement if I say that we EXPECTED the beta/alpha or whatever resembling Half-Life 2 would leak to the Internet =)). It's none of our business to comment on how the beta leaked to the Net. We are more interested in having a real DirectX 9.0 application that makes use of all the API potentials to the full and is in fact an outline of future DirectX 9.0 games. It's an ungrateful job commenting a very raw beta, since all may (and most likely will) radically change in the final release, but anyway let's get round to it =).
The Half-Life 2 engine is just the pure HLSV which doesn't bode any good to NVIDIA video cards. As our tests performed with two demo benchmarks (for which a special personal thankyou to Andrey Vorobyov who kindly presented the demo reels for tests) showed, NVIDIA card simply proved to be crushed by the ATI counterpart. Although ForceWare 52.16 shows a large performance boost, it doesn't improve the situation at all.
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