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3D Performance with Chronicles of Riddick: High-end cards February 25, 2005 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: Just as Far Cry stunned everyone with its jaw-dropping graphics and great gameplay in 2004, Chronicles of Riddick appears to be doing the same this year. The game sports an advanced engine with support of 2.0 shaders, ragdoll physics, etc, and is capable of pushing today's latest hardware to its limits in its 2.0++ shader mode. But which card runs fastest in Chronicles of Riddick, and exactly what kind of a performance hit do you get when you crank the game up to 2.0++ mode. Find out in this article!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 7 ) |
The DX9 gaming era is upon us
Based on the recent Hollywood movie (the events in the game take place before the movie), in Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay you’ll play the role of Vin Diesel himself, Richard Riddick, as he attempts to escape from Butcher Bay, a triple max security prison that makes Alcatraz look like “Camp Cupcake”, the minimum security prison in West Virginia that currently serves as the home for Martha Stewart and 1,054 other women.
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But Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay isn’t your typical shoot ‘em up first-person shooter with repetitive gameplay, as the game combines action, stealth, adventure, and RPG elements all into one package. In our review of Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Jakub went on to say “this is the game Doom 3 should have been”, ultimately earning our Editor’s Choice Award and a 93% rating. But we weren’t the only ones who fell in love with the game, as a number of you have written in with your own glowing reviews of the game, while numerous other publications for both the PC and Xbox have been equally impressed with this game, earning a 91% overall score on GameRankings.com.
Much like CryTek came out of nowhere with Far Cry in 2004, and Infinity Ward with Call of Duty at the end of 2003, Starbreeze Studios appears poised to do the same this year with Chronicles of Riddick, especially with its incredibly low $30 price tag.
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Graphically, Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is a definite treat in the eye candy department. While the game was originally launched for the Xbox, Starbreeze has adopted their custom Starbreeze Engine used by the game to take advantage of 2.0 pixel and vertex shaders. Like most recent shooters, Chronicles of Riddick takes advantage of normal maps, while the game’s “2.0++” mode enables soft stencil shadows for GeForce 6 users (although this comes at a remarkable performance hit, which you’ll see in our benchmarks). Rumors have persisted that the game supports 2.0b and 3.0 shaders as well, but to the best of our knowledge, this isn’t the case, and with rumors that Starbreeze is already working on their next engine for PlayStation 3/Xbox Next, it’s doubtful this would be added to the game now that it’s finished.
How we test
With so much going for it, we knew we had to find a way to incorporate the game into our test suite. But unfortunately, unlike DOOM 3, Half-Life 2, and Far Cry, Chronicles of Riddick doesn’t provide a “timedemo” mode for benchmarking, nor does it provide demo recording/playback capability.
UPDATE 2/27/05: It has come to our attention, that Chronicles of Riddick does feature a timedemo mode for benchmarking, and the commands are similar to those used by DOOM 3. Simply type "CTRL ALT ~" to bring down the console and use the "timdemo" command to initiate timedemo mode.
So how are we able to run consistent benchmarks with the game if we can’t run 100% repeatable demos for playback? Simple, we improvised. Chronicles of Riddick has a number of areas within the game where you can attain consistent results, but we don’t want to get into specifics, as we wouldn’t like to see graphics card manufacturers tuning their drivers specifically for areas/maps that we list in this article. We will say that our test sequence combines both outdoor and indoor areas, with lots of shadowing involved. We’ve provided our FRAPS log so you can see that our sequence is indeed reliable, the system used consists of a GeForce 6800 GT running at 1024x768 (no AA or AF) on an Athlon 64 4000+.
In three test runs, we got a pretty steady average (well under 1 frame per second separates the three fps scores), with consistent figures for our maximum and minimum frame rates as well.
| Test systems | Page:: ( 2 / 7 ) |
System Setup
Athlon 64 4000+
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe
1GB OCZ EL DDR400 Platinum Edition Rev 2
ATI RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition
ATI RADEON X800 XL
Sapphire RADEON X850 XT
Driver version CAT 5.2
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra PCI-E
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT PCI-E
Driver version 67.66 (obtained off nZone website)
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0c
Benchmarks
Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay Director’s Cut
SIDEBAR: ATI/Sapphire recommends a 300-watt PSU for use with the X850 XT.
| Chronicles of Riddick | Page:: ( 3 / 7 ) |
Chronicles of Riddick – OpenGL
| Riddick 4xAA | Page:: ( 4 / 7 ) |
Chronicles of Riddick – OpenGL
| Riddick 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 5 / 7 ) |
Chronicles of Riddick – OpenGL
| Riddick 2.0++ | Page:: ( 6 / 7 ) |
Chronicles of Riddick – OpenGL
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 7 / 7 ) |
The only real problem we’ve noticed is support. By default, GeForce 6 users run in 2.0++ mode, which significantly hampers performance (in our testing, performance was reduced by a factor of 3X). This has led to a number of users complaining of poor frame rates with the game.
As far as performance is concerned, NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 GT and GeForce 6800 Ultra put up a very strong showing in Chronicles of Riddick, sweeping all tests we conducted. At lower resolutions, the margins between the NVIDIA and ATI cards are pretty great -- in one case the X850 XT PE trailed the GeForce 6800 GT by 15% at 800x600 -- but the X850 XT Platinum Edition begins to reel in the 6800 GT once AA and AF are turned on, especially at 1600x1200, thanks to the X850 XT PE’s memory bandwidth advantage. For example, with 4xAA and 8xAF enabled, the GeForce 6800 GT outperforms the X850 XT PE by just 3% at 1600x1200, but at 800x600 the margin between both cards is a more substantial 9%.
As we mentioned in the intro, our test sequence consists of outdoor and indoor areas, but chiefly contains more indoor scenes than outdoor, with some areas containing an abundant amount of shadows. Stencil shadow performance has always been NVIDIA’s strong point with their GeForce 6800 family, which likely explains why the 6800 GT and Ultra performed so strongly in our testing today.
In any case, we will continue to explore performance with Chronicles of Riddick, with more card shootouts as well if you’d like. It looks like we’ve found a pretty nice benchmark to play with don’t you think?