Halo @ 1024x768 and 1280x1024 w/Fraps

In order to benchmark Halo, I went around the initial control room, did some repeatable key actions, and went into the energy powerup chamber. There are issues with AA, so those scores will be left out.

We can see the same trend as we did with UT2003. The AIW holds a slight lead over the HIS, which is no slouch itself. In case you're wondering, we don't display 1600x1280 results for cards in this class since, to put it bluntly, performance sucks. 1280 is about as high as we would go, but if you'd like to know, we're looking at 26.24 frames per second with the AIW, which I found to be very unplayable.

NHL 2004

We downloaded the NHL demo from EA, and allowed the computer to play through one period of Anaheim vs New Jersey. Fraps was used to capture the framerates of the action.

Although the game is not as graphically intense as some modern day shooters, when you load up 12 3D animated players skating around, a fast setup is recommended. All three cards are up to the task when it comes to playing at 1024, but lose close to 50% of their framerates when bumping up to 1280x1024. Only the Radeon 9600 XT based cards were able to maintain their 60fps clip at the higher resolution.

Call of Duty @ 1024x768

The latest WWII shooter uses a heavily modified Quake 3 engine. We ran the benchmark using our own custom timedemo of our guys Scott and Brook trying to kill each other.

Call of Duty @ 1280x1024

As we've seen in the past, nVidia hardware typically does pretty well in Q3 based benchmarks, and keeps a lot closer to ATI's hardware (surpassing the HIS 9600 XT in some cases) than it did in the DX benchmarks. The extra 25MHz in the AIW 9600 XT is enough to push it ahead of the others in this WWII shooter.

Max Payne 2 @ 1024x768

We used Fraps again, and ran in a repeatable route around the level, firing our gun at designated areas, and using bullet time to go through a couple of doors. Our game settings were at maximum quality, using hardware D3D acceleration.

With no AA/AF, the game was very smooth, and it looked quite nice. Raising the quality to 4xAA/8xAF lowers the performance, but in each case, the game was still very playable.

Max Payne 2 @ 1280x1024

Bumping the resolution up to 1280 was a different story. The game ran smoothly enough, when nothing was going on. The minute the bad guys started shooting, and we shot back, the game slowed down considerably. Forget about even playing with AA/AF enabled, unless you enjoy stuttering gameplay.