Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup - Part 2: High End Shootout
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 7, 2003 5:30 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness
So, as I'm writing this, the phrase "be careful what you wish for" comes to mind. I had my reasons for not wanting to benchmark this game, and in order for me to feel comfortable with handing out the numbers I need to touch on some of the more important issues. The inclusion of TRAOD in this benchmark suite is based on the demand of the community (as everything here always will be). But it's also our duty to try to make sure the information you get here is complete (which is a daunting task for this particular game).
Our initial thinking was that TRAOD simply isn't a very good game, nor would it be representative of future DX9 games. The graphics features are no where near as impressive as something along the lines of Half Life 2 and high dynamic range effects, and it looks more like a DX7 game running on DX9 shaders. It is our opinion that this game won't be heavily played and is more of just a synthetic benchmark people want to see in order to try to predict future performance.
Unfortunately, future performance can't be predicted until we have games from the future. No one seems to want to lend me a time machine, so I can't get those numbers yet. Looking back though, I can offer this advice: don't spend $500 on a video card until the game you want to play on it comes out. Trying to buy something now in order to be ready for games of the future only means that you won't have that money to spend on the newest best card that's out at that point. I also feel comfortable saying that TRAOD performance is a predictor of nothing but TRAOD performance.
In taking this stance, we have decided to do things a little differently than most other sites when it comes to TRAOD. We have turned this game into a sort of stress test that pushes the cards as far as they can go in order to only test the real world impact of DX9 Pixel Shaders. We did four tests at each resolution in order to see the performance differences with and without PS 2.0 and with and without AA. For each card, we use the application to set all the features and left the drivers alone. Part of the reasoning behind this was that AA in Tomb Raider only works if set by the application. Anisotropic filtering is selectable in the game, and was left off for all tests. The reason we check AA and not AF is that AF happens during texturing, but AA is implemented via shaders in TRAOD so it stresses the card in more of the way we want to test. But since we are comparing performance of each card to itself in order to see a performance delta, the actual settings shouldn't be a problem. Beyond3d has some extensive documentation of the TRAOD settings and all the options. If you'd like to learn more, I would point you to them.
For our tests, the only really important information is that we use the NVIDIA Cg compiler rather than the DX9 HLSL default compiler (there was no performance difference between the two on NVIDIA cards for the most part, only image quality improvements).
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Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
#41 "[...] who butters your bread???"Thats an interesting question, I suspect he does though my question is "who wants to know?" ; )
In regard to your other question. "Why can't we have a true winner now?". As for myself, I'm going to give Dereck and Anand the benefit of the doubt.
It seems to me that they realize that NVIDIA attempted to do somthing unique with it's 5000 series being that it does not exactly hold to the Direct X 9.1 spec. For instance it has a 16 bit and 32 bit rendering mode while DX 9.1 requires 24 bit - which ATI does (refer to Halflife 2 and DOOM III reviews). In the sharder area NVIDIA holds FAR more code (micro ops) than ATI - also if you check back to Anand's original post on the ATI and NVIDIA shootout(s) where there is a comparison between AA and AF NVIDIA was a CLEAR winner. I seem to recall a while ago that NVIDIA claimed ATI didn't do TRUE AF so they were therefore CHEATING. Boy did that one come back around with teeth, huh?
What I'm saying is NVIDIA tried to one up ATI by tring to do more, unfortunately it seems they tried to do TOO much and ended up doing SHADY maneuvers like the whole Future Mark mess. They should of instead focused on the spec. DX 9.1 and the Microsoft shader/pixel code path and not tried to pull a GLIDE like 3DFX (excuse the parsed english).
So, hopefully NVIDIA learns from it's mistakes modifies it's silicon to the spec. and gives us all BETTER cards to choose from come March/April.
As far as the authors are concerned, Anand and Derick seem to be attempting JUSTICE (helping the party who needs the most help, and treating all parties equally) - which in this case seems to be NVIDIA. The authors are helping NVIDIA by dropping HEAVY hints like what you stated
" Next year will be the year of DX9 titles, and it will be under the next generation of games that we will finally be able to crown a true DX9 winner. Until then, anyone's guess is fair game." and
" If NVIDIA can continue to extract the kinds of performance gains from unoptimized DX9 code as they have done with the 52.14 drivers (without sacrificing image quality), they will be well on their way to taking the performance crown back from ATI by the time NV40 and R400 drop.".
If NVIDIA takes head of these CONSTRUCTIVE statements then the entire gaming community could benifit - in better prices, higher quality to which the customer usually benifits (AMD vs INTEL sound familiar?).
So, let us be easy and enjoy the night. Time will tell.
Cheers,
aka #37
PS: Dereck please excuse me for leaving out your name before. The article was well written.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Regarding my previous post #44, I wanted to write:...the difference **between AA/AF and noAA/AF** is very noticeable in the game...
Jeff7181 - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Can you say "highly programmable GPU?" I can =)Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Why didn't you guys wait for Catalyst 3.8? It's out tomorrow and is reported to fix many IQ problems in games like NWN. What would a couple of days have hurt, especially since this article is going to be irrelevant after the Cat drivers are released tomorrow?Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Note: the AA/AF and noAA/AF images of Warcraft3 have been mixed up for the NV52.14.It tells a lot about the value of the screenshots that it takes careful inspection to find this error. I have played a lot of War3 recently and the difference is very noticeable in game, even with this GF4.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
#18 Its not a problem figuring out the graphs its just weird that he would choose that type of graph excluding FPS.BTW I own a 5900U and a 9700pro.
I don't like people avoiding ps2.0 tests. My 5900 sucks at it. I paid too much for what I got in the 5900. I try to get a good bang for the buck. The 5900 is not.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
...DerekWilson - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
First off... Thanks Pete ;-) ...Secondly, Anand and I both put a great deal of work into this article, and I am very glad to see the responses it has generated.
Many of the image quality issues from part 1 were due to rendering problems that couldn't be captured in a screen shot (like jerkiness in X2 and F1), or a lack of AA. For some of the tests, we just didn't do AA performance benchmarks if one driver or the other didn't do what it was supposed to. There were no apples to anything other than apples tests in this review. The largest stretch was X2 where the screen was jerky and the AA was subpar. But we definitly noted that.
TRAOD isn't a very high quality game, and certainly isn't the only DX9 (with PS2.0) test on the list. Yes, ATI beat NV in that bench. But its also true that ATI won most of the other benchmarks as well.
Anyway, thanks again for the feedback, sorry BF1942 couldn't make it in, and we'll be bring back a flight sim game as soon as we tweak it out.
J Derek Wilson
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
Didn't Gabe Newell complain about screen capture "issues" with the Nvidia 50.xx drivers that show better image quality in screenshots than actually shows up in game?Anand spoke about image quality problems in almost every test in part 1, but i see almost nothing wrong with the screencaps in part 2.
Can you verify this Anand?
Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 7, 2003 - link
No difference in IQ, huh? Am I the only person to notice an IQ difference between the AA+8xAF pics of Aquamark3?http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/video/roundups...
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/video/roundups...
It's funny how Anand and Derek did not comment on this. Maybe they missed it because they based their comparison off of those tiny images. Ah, so that's what the need of full-sized images are for?!