Far Cry and
Serious Sam 2 have been chosen for our
Direct3D benchmarking because they're popular enough, provide with documented
capabilities to capture and play back demo records, and able to display both
average and minimal FPS. These titles also support OpenGL rendering, but it's
either buggy (Far Cry) or slow (Serious Sam 2). Both games utilise
proprietary engines supporting SM3.0 which has been activated for all cards
tested.
Far Cry
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(click to enlarge, 112Kb and 154Kb respectively)
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A popular demo record Training by Ubisoft has been chosen. It may be
considered as consisting of two parts: inside the cave (short viewing range, low
geometry level — 20 to 50 thousand polygons per frame) and outside on a
run to the quay (long viewing range, average geometry level — 150 to 200
thousand polygons per frame). Both parts don't involve numerous lighting
sources. All game settings have been set to Very High except of Water Quality
which has been able to reach Ultra High and Shadow Quality which has got to be
High.
Well, there are no results of Sapphire Radeon X1600 Pro. This video card has
failed to render lighting sources properly, though reducing Lighting Quality to
Low has made the trick. (update: this issue has been eliminated with the game
patch v1.40)
So, BFG GeForce 7800GS OC has outperformed ASUS GeForce 6600GT Top once
again, though the processor is the reason why it has been bound to 95-98 average
FPS at 1024x768. Another limitation of 40-43 minimal FPS all over the modes is
the processor's fault as well. Although ASUS GeForce 6600GT Top has got close to
BFG GeForce 7800GS OC in the easiest mode (1024x768 TF noAA), the difference
between them has grown to 46% in the hardest mode (1280x1024 16xAF 4xMSAA).
Nevertheless, ASUS GeForce 6600GT Top has shown playable performance with an
exception of too low minimal FPS in the hardest mode.
Serious Sam 2
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(click to enlarge, 207Kb and 194Kb respectively)
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The author has chosen the Branchester demo record by Croteam. This one
demonstrates all power of the Serious Sam 2 engine: long wide-angle viewing
range, large well-crafted textures, nice special effects. In general, texturing
and rasterising play a key role for this demo record, though speed of advanced
anisotropic filtering can also be well tested with it. All game options have
been set to the highest possible, neither HDR nor Bloom have been enabled.
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BFG GeForce 7800GS OC is far ahead of its competitors. It seems that
Branchester isn't processor-dependent very much, so BFG GeForce 7800GS OC has
faced some problems in the easiest mode only — the overclocking has
delivered a modest increase of 4% in average FPS and nothing at all in minimal
FPS. ASUS GeForce 6600GT Top has brought good performance through all the
resolutions and modes. Nothing outstanding, but still playable. Sapphire Radeon
X1600 Pro has delivered acceptable performance with trilinear filtering only. By
the way, its performance decrease with 16x anisotropic filtering enabled has
figured into about 40%. Not good at all.