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3D Performance with Quake 4: Part 2 Mainstream Cards October 26, 2005 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: After evaluating Quake 4's performance with a handful of high-end cards, today we're here to take a look at the cards in the mainstream price segment. This includes ATI offerings ranging from the RADEON X700 PRO all the way up to the X800 XL (including ATI's X1600 XT) as well as GeForce cards ranging from the GeForce 6600 GT up to the 6800 GT. In addition, we've also run high quality mode vs medium quality tests, 128MB vs 256MB video memory tests, as well as 256MB vs 512MB benches. See how these mainstream cards perform in this article!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 14 ) |
If you recall, the medium quality mode uses compression for the game’s normal, specular, and diffuse maps. You’ll still get high-resolution, 512x512 textures in medium quality mode, which is something you won’t see if you go down to the game’s low quality mode.
The low quality setting also drops specular maps to 64x64 and was originally designed for 64MB cards, so it really wasn’t designed for today’s mainstream graphics offerings (the performance difference between the two modes isn’t very significant either). Fortunately if you are running older hardware and needed to run DOOM 3 in low quality to achieve decent frame rates last year, the visual difference between low and medium quality continues to be rather insignificant in Quake 4, as you’ll see in these screenshots:
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In fact, we, along with quite a few other hardware reviewers were pretty surprised by just how good the lower quality modes looked in comparison to the higher quality modes in DOOM 3 last year. DOOM 3’s ultra quality mode looked largely the same as high quality, while high quality looked pretty close to medium quality (remember that DOOM 3’s high quality mode removed normal map compression and set anisotropic filtering to 8x by default). We concluded Part 2 of our DOOM 3 performance roundup by saying “It’s really surprising to see how well DOOM 3 scales with older hardware.” We can’t help but feel the same way about Quake 4.
Sure, you will see a dramatic decline in performance as you scale down to less expensive hardware, but at least that decline isn’t accompanied by a large drop off in visual quality. The game largely looks the same, only with lower frame rates. The sharp visuals help to keep the gamer immersed in the game’s many dark environments.
But the next question we’ve decided to answer is how does the game look on the new X1000 cards with ATI’s latest hotfix driver?
| Image quality comparison | Page:: ( 2 / 14 ) |
In a nutshell, with this new driver ATI has basically tweaked the way memory read/write requests are prioritized in order to improve performance specifically for OpenGL titles like DOOM 3 and Quake 4. ATI’s old way of handling these requests turned out to be inefficient, resulting in lower performance.
In last week’s article, we found the tweaks made with the new driver improved performance dramatically for the X1800 XL and X1800 XT, but many of you wanted to see before and after screenshots to see if image quality was affected. Have a look for yourself:
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As you can see, image quality is different with the new driver; it actually looks better. Check out the difference in the wall on the left side of the map:
Old ATI driver
Optimized (newer) beta driver
You can also see a difference here:
Old ATI driver
Optimized (newer) beta driver
We have a feeling that we’ve probably stumbled upon a bug present in the older driver that was fixed with the newer (beta) driver. Image quality looks better with the newer driver in the second screenshot as well.
Now that the image quality issue has been cleared up, let’s see what kind of performance improvements the new driver brings…
| Quake 4 Performance enhancement | Page:: ( 3 / 14 ) |
| 4xAA/4xAF Performance enhancement | Page:: ( 4 / 14 ) |
| 512MB vs 256MB performance | Page:: ( 5 / 14 ) |
4xAA/4xAF Performance
| 256MB vs 128MB performance | Page:: ( 6 / 14 ) |
4xAA/4xAF Performance
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 7 / 14 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon 64 3500+
DFI nForce4 Ultra Infinity
1GB OCZ DDR400 SDRAM
ATI RADEON X700 PRO 256MB
ATI RADEON X700 PRO 128MB
ASUS RADEON X800 256MB
ATI RADEON X1600 XT 256MB
ATI RADEON X800 XL 512MB
ATI RADEON X800 XL 256MB
Driver version CATALYST 5.10
ATI RADEON X1600 XT 256MB
Driver version hotfix_xp-2k_dd_ccc_027483a.exe
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT 128MB
MSI GeForce 6800 256MB
Driver version ForceWare 81.85
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0c
Benchmarks
Quake 4
| Quake 4 performance | Page:: ( 8 / 14 ) |
| 2xAA Performance | Page:: ( 9 / 14 ) |
| 2xAA/8xAF Performance | Page:: ( 10 / 14 ) |
| 4xAA Performance | Page:: ( 11 / 14 ) |
| 4xAA/4xAF Performance | Page:: ( 12 / 14 ) |
| High Quality Performance | Page:: ( 13 / 14 ) |
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 14 / 14 ) |
The memory controller tweaks found in ATI’s beta driver add up to at best, 15% in additional performance. This was found in Quake 4 at 800x600x32 with no AA or AF applied. In no other case did we see a double-digit increase in performance, with most gains in the 3-5% range. This is hardly enough for the RADEON X1600 XT to overtake its primary competitor (for now at least), the GeForce 6800. While the X1600 XT does become competitive with the GeForce 6800 once 4xAA is applied, it still finishes behind the 1.5 year old GeForce 6800 card for the most part, and even falls behind the performance of the X800 in some cases.
This is hardly what most people expected from the X1600 XT, especially in light of ATI’s more recent mainstream offerings, the X800 GT and X800 GTO, but as we mentioned in our X1600 XT performance article, the final design of its RV530 core was finished well before these faster X800 variants ever hit retail. ATI will likely have to cook up a stripped X1800 variant (most likely sporting the “SE” or “LE” moniker), in order to compete with NVIDIA’s higher end mainstream offerings like the GeForce 6800.
At the higher end of the mainstream segment, the GeForce 6800 GT reigns supreme. ATI’s RADEON X800 XL typically finishes 6-9% behind the GeForce 6800 GT in performance. And as we saw in the 256MB versus 512MB testing, the additional memory found in the RADEON X800 XL 512MB plays no dividends at the settings we tested. Like DOOM 3, the additional memory likely won’t play a role until the ultra quality mode is used. We also found that the performance between the X700 PRO 128MB and 256MB was largely identical, but we’d still suggest a 256MB card as most games are beginning to take advantage of the additional memory found on 256MB cards.
In summary, with its DOOM 3 roots, Quake 4 largely mimics the performance of its older sibling. If your system was capable of handling DOOM 3 last year, it’ll probably hold up well in Quake 4 as well. With mainstream GeForce cards steadily falling in price, they are the cards we’d recommend at the $150-$300 price point, with the GeForce 6800 GT obviously the king of the hill. ATI’s X1600 family boasts impressive clock speeds, but for now their performance just isn’t as competitive as the X1800 family right now. Perhaps that will change in future driver updates, but that’s where things stand right now at least.