Jedi Knight II

    This game has been around for quite awhile, but still has very nice graphics, thanks to the Quake III engine, and a good story behind it.  This makes it one very nice game and a standard game for testing on many websites.  We will look at its performance with all the settings at maximum and using the included timedemo.  So does the AiW perform very well here, or is it just a jack of all trades, master of none video card?  Lets first look at 1024*768

    Here we see the driver quality of the cards we tested.  In an odd twist the overclocked AiW 9000 performs worse than its standard clocked brother.  The nVidia based video cards have the best driver, at least with this software.  Next is the ATi chips, which have a larger performance difference between them.  In the last place beside the overclocked AiW 9000, is the Matrox Parhelia which performs adequately in this test.  What happens when the quality levels are turned up with AA and ansiotropic filtering being enabled?

    Here is where there is a marked difference between the higher end cards and the lower end cards.  The Ti4600-8X holds the top spot without losing much in the way of performance.  The Radeon AiW 9000 doesn't perform as well as one of its direct competitors, the GF4 MX 440.  Here it is about 5-8fps lower than the MX card, though in this case it doesn't mean as much as in some cases but it is still 12.5-21.5% slower than the MX.  This can mean the difference between playable or not, though both cards have a minimum frame rate that is similar, at about 30fps.  At default clock speed the 8500LE is slightly faster than the 9000 by about 4% or 1.5fps, which isn't much at all.  When we overclock the video card we get a 8% increase in frame rate for a 9% increase in core speed and a 11% increase in memory speed.  How about at 1600*1200, how does the card perform?

    The standings change compared to the other two tests so far.  Apart from the GF4 Ti4600-8X, which still holds the top spot most things change.  The Radeon 8500LE takes the top spot of the remaining cards, and also has one of the flatter graphs of these results, as it seems that the extra pipeline gives the 8500 the advantage.  The overclocked AiW 9000, is only slightly slower than the 8500LE and is faster and has a minimum frame rate higher than the MX 440.  When you overclock the AiW 9000 you get another 9% increase, just as with the AA test.

Serious Sam SE

    Serious Sam SE brought a simple concept in fps games, have massive amounts of enimies to shoot, and fused it with high quality graphics to make it a game that can be played to take your mind off of matters.  So how does the AiW work here, is it like that found with the other OpenGL game we tested?

    What can we see from Serious Sam?  It seems that the ATi cards do very well here, perhaps the optimizations in Serious Sam account for this.  However the higher clock speed of the 9000 gives it a slight boost over the 8500LE, which means that in this case it may be GPU speed dependent, at least on the ATi side of matters.  Versus the MX 440, all the ATi cards do much better, in the range of 20-30fps better (33-47%), which is a significant increase from a similarly priced video card.  Overclocking the AiW 9000 gives it a 7.6% increase of frame rate, and makes the entire graph just a little bit flatter with less in the way of large variations in frame rate.  How about with AA and ansiotropic filtering, does the AiW 9000 hold on to its high placing?

    How does the AiW 9000 card do?  We can see that it takes quite a hit from enabling AA and ansiotropic filtering in Serious Sam SE, as it loses about 75% of its frame rate just by enabling these features.  The MX does better here as it takes a slightly lower hit from enabling these quality features, as it beats both the standard clocked AiW 9000 and the 8500LE.  When overclocked the AiW 9000 equals, and wins by a very slim margin, against the MX 440.  One small interesting feature from the frame rate graph is that the ATi cards spike slightly about halfway through the demo, which makes the maximum frame rate higher than the MX 440 while the average frame rate is still lower.  But at the frame rates that these four bottom video cards are producing you will not really be able to play at these settings in Serious Sam.

    Here we see a return to the results that we found at 1024*768 with high settings.  The GF4 Ti4600-8X is the only card to achieve over 60fps in this test, though the ATi cards aren't too far off.  The ATi cards perform between 6-13fps better (16-34%) than the MX in this case, which brings them closer to the 'playable' level that many people want.  The MX 440 has a very flat graph, showing that it is GPU/memory limited at this resolution.  The ATi cards aren't as GPU limited here as there have much larger 'spikes' in frame rate at two points where the frame rate reaches closer to 80fps that the average of 40-48fps.  However the AiW 9000 still gets a good boost from the extra GPU/memory speed provided by overclocking, increasing its frame rate by almost 10%.  Here again the AiW 9000 does better than the 8500LE, besting it by about 5%, which shows that Serious Sam likes the design of the 9000 series better than that of the 8500 series.  So we can see that with Serious Sam, unlike Jedi Knight, that the ATi AiW 9000 does better than a GeForce 4 MX 440.  So we can see a split between the OpenGL games, as one prefers the nVidia cards, while the other likes ATi cards.  Does this continue with Direct X games, such as Max Payne and Unreal Tournament 2003?  Lets find out.

Max Payne

    This game combines a 'cheesy' storyline with very good quality DirectX 8 based graphics.  This has created a good game to play, at least for a short amount of time.  The demo we will be using is from the guys at 3D Center which provides a good indication of overall game performance.  How well does this video card handle this Direct 3D game.

    The results here almost mirror the results with Serious Sam at 1024 with AA and ansiotropic filtering enabled, apart from the fact that the frame rates are higher.  The AiW 9000 does very well, with a substantial lead over both the MX 440 and the 8500LE.  The 8500LE for the first time is not close to the frame rate of the AiW 9000 cards, rather it is over 25% lower in frame rate than the AiW 9000, and is even slower than the MX 440, and most of its average frame rate occurs between seconds 43-48 where the frame rate skyrockets to 130fps.  The MX 440 does somewhat better than the 8500LE but still can't manage to reach 60fps.  It too has a spike at those 5 seconds but doesn't go nearly as high instead going to about 110fps, which is only 2X the average frame rate of the card.  The AiW 9000 performs about 12-16fps (26-32%) better than the MX 440 and is able to stay above 60fps as an average.  The spike helps raise the frame rate but doesn't quite double the average frame rate during this short period.  Overclocking again brings some gains, in this case 5fps or 8.7%, which helps bring the card within striking distance of the top three results.  How about with AA and ansiotropic filtering enabled, how do the cards perform in this game?

    There is a new leader in this test, the Matrox Parhelia with its more efficient AA technique.  The ATi cards perform 'poorly', but that is to be expected as these are really just budget cards.  The AiW 9000 is the fastest of the three 'budget' cards, and holds a 7fps (59%) lead over the highly stressed MX 440, though this card is just as GPU/memory limited as the MX 440, though it has a better rendering design than the MX 440.  Overclocking the card leads to a 10% increase in performance, though that is only 2fps in total.  The 8500LE is about halfway between the MX 440 and the AiW 9000.  Overall  it is a stretch to consider the performance of all but the Parhelia as playable, though an argument could be made for the GF4 Ti4600-8X cards.  Does the performance picture look any better at 1600*1200, with these quality options disabled?

    The results here are interesting, as we see what seems to be the top three spots taken up by the usual video cards.  However as we look we see that the overclocked AiW 9000 is very close to the performance of the Parhelia, in fact it is really the same.  The graphs for these two cards is fairly different, with the AiW 9000 making use of its spike at seconds 43-48 to bring it the level of the Parhelia, which doesn't have any such spike.  Otherwise the non-overclocked AiW 9000 does well, having an advantage of 6fps (24%) over both the 8500LE and the MX 440.  The graphs of the MX 440 and the AiW 9000 are similar with the same variation that is attributed to the 5 second spike.  However the 8500LE almost triples its average frame rate value in those 5 seconds, which is interesting to say the least.  In this test it seems that all but the 8500LE and the MX 440 should be at least basically playable at this resolution.  We've seen the ATi cards best the MX in this test, how do they fair in the graphically demanding UT2003?