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3D Performance with Chronicles of Riddick Part 2: Mainstream Cards March 03, 2005 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: In part 1 of our 3D Performance with Chronicles of Riddick series, we evaluated the performance of ATI and NVIDIA's latest high-end cards with this title. Today, we're here to see how the mainstream cards do! In this article we've rounded up NVIDIA's popular GeForce 6600 GT and GeForce 6800 256MB, as well as ATI's RADEON X700 PRO 256MB, X800 256MB, and X800 XL. Who comes out on top, and which card looks better? See the results in this article!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 9 ) |
ATI’s RADEON X800 XL is a perfect example of this. With 16 pixel pipelines, a 256-bit memory interface with 256MB of GDDR3 memory operating at 500MHz, it boasts specs that would easily dust the high-end $500 cards from one year ago. NVIDIA’s GeForce 6600 GT turned heads when it was first introduced as well. You get 8 pixel pipes with a blazing 500MHz core clock and 500MHz memory, shader model 3.0 support, and best of all, PCI Express variants can already be found online for under $180! It’s pretty remarkable to see just how far the graphics market has come just in the past 12 months. Ain’t competition grand?
In addition to these two cards, we’ve included other mainstream stars, such as the RADEON X800 and X700 PRO, and the GeForce 6800 256MB. All the cards we’ve tested today are PCI Express-based, but we will be going back and taking a look at AGP cards; we’ve also received requests to evaluate 64-bit performance as well (although we may wait a month on this one since it appears the release of the final version of 64-bit Windows is imminent, hopefully by then 64-bit display drivers will have improved).
Test Notes
Since we published our first article, we’ve received a few additional tips on benchmarking with Chronicles of Riddick. First, Riddick does have built in benchmarking and recording capability, in fact the commands are quite similar to the ones id Software uses for DOOM 3. Type “record” to record your demo, and “stop” to stop recording at the console, which is opened by pressing Ctrl+Alt+~. To playback your demo in timedemo mode, simply type “timedemo [name of your demo]” and press enter. So if you named your demo “test” you’d simply type “timedemo test” at the console. The demo will run and spit out your average frame rate, just like DOOM 3 would.
For more in-depth results, the “benchmark” command is used. So in the example above, you’d type “benchmark test”, press enter, and your demo would be played back in timedemo mode. The one key difference here though is that once the demo is completed, Riddick closes, kicking you back to the desktop. You then open your root Riddick directory, where you should find a text file with your benchmark results titled “BenchResults .txt”. Simply open this file, and you’ll not only see your average fps, but also your minimum and maximum framerates, as well as the current framerate for every frame in the demo your recorded! Pretty cool huh?
If there’s one thing we can’t stress enough though is that all GeForce 6 users must go into the shader mode submenu (found after clicking on the video main menu) and specify 2.0 shaders. By default Chronicles of Riddick loads in 2.0++ shader mode for GeForce 6 cards. This setting enables soft shadows and can have a significant impact on your performance, as you’ll see later in this article. Soft shadows are nice, but they definitely aren’t worth the performance hit.
| Image Quality | Page:: ( 2 / 9 ) |
Before we get started with the benchmark results, we’re first going to quickly take a look at the anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering quality of the NVIDIA and ATI cards.
Anti-aliasing
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While ATI has traditionally held the edge in AA quality, NVIDIA implemented a new rotated-grid sampling pattern for GeForce 6, which has significantly narrowed the gap between the two manufacturers. Looking closely at the images above, both cards look rather good, but once you look a little closer, you can see a few slight differences:
RADEON X800 XL 2xAA
GeForce 6800 2xAA
Zooming in on the edge of the very first stair, we can see that the GeForce 6800 card does a slightly better job of smoothing the edges out than the RADEON X800 XL. Let’s try 4xAA:
RADEON X800 XL 4xAA
GeForce 6800 4xAA
Cranking up the AA to the 4X setting improves things significantly, but the NVIDIA board still looks slightly better than ATI, although the two cards are very close.
Anisotropic filtering
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RADEON X800 XL 0xAF
GeForce 6800 0xAF
RADEON X800 XL 2xAF
GeForce 6800 2xAF
While this is entirely subjective, we prefer the crisper textures found on the GeForce 6800 with 2xAF. You can really see the extra detail near the rust on the metal floor.
RADEON X800 XL 8xAF
GeForce 6800 8xAF
Under the 8xAF setting it’s harder to declare one card a winner of another in our opinion; they both look really good.
| Test systems | Page:: ( 3 / 9 ) |
System Setup
Athlon 64 3800+
ECS KN1 Extreme (nForce4 Ultra)
1GB OCZ EL DDR400 Platinum Edition Rev 2
ATI RADEON X800 XL
ASUS RADEON X800
ATI RADEON X700 PRO 256MB
Driver version CAT 5.2
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra PCI-E
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT PCI-E
Driver version 71.84 (obtained off nZone website)
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
OCZ PowerStream 600W PSU
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0c
Benchmarks
Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay Director’s Cut
| Riddick 0xAA | Page:: ( 4 / 9 ) |
Chronicles of Riddick – OpenGL
| Riddick 2xAA | Page:: ( 5 / 9 ) |
Chronicles of Riddick – OpenGL
| Riddick 2xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 6 / 9 ) |
Chronicles of Riddick – OpenGL
| Riddick 4xAA | Page:: ( 7 / 9 ) |
Chronicles of Riddick – OpenGL
| Riddick 2.0++ | Page:: ( 8 / 9 ) |
Chronicles of Riddick – OpenGL
| Final thoughts | Page:: ( 9 / 9 ) |
Under the strain of 4xAA, the GeForce 6600 GT’s 128-bit memory interface is giving up 6.4GB/sec of memory bandwidth to the RADEON X800 (16GB/sec versus 22.4GB/sec), giving the X800 an 8% advantage at 800x600 with 4xAA, which only gets worse as the resolution increases, eventually blossoming to 26% by 1600x1200.
It comes as no surprise to us to see the RADEON X800 XL blossom so much, ultimately running faster than any other card we tested in Chronicles of Riddick. While ATI’s stencil shadow performance may not be quite as good as NVIDIA’s, the X800 XL’s 16-pipeline core and high-speed memory are just no match for anything NVIDIA’s currently offers in the $300 price range. Of course, finding an X800 XL at ATI’s MSRP of $300 has proven to be a bit difficult, but ironically enough CompUSA has stepped up to the plate and is offering the card for $299.99, so if you’ve been shopping for an X800 XL card lately, we’d suggest you pick one up from there.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, NVIDIA’s going to have to respond to the X800 XL if they wish to remain competitive at the $300 price point, as the GeForce 6800 just doesn’t have the horsepower to compete. Either they’re going to have to lower prices on the 6800 GT, or they’ll have to come up with a cheaper method to produce GPUs, and ultimately graphics cards, as right now the RADEON X800 XL is the best value out there at $300.