3D Quality
Ansiotropic filtering and anti-aliasing are standard parts of the quality picture currently. All companies that make video cards have implemented higher quality levels of either ansiotropic filtering (ATI - 16X), or higher levels of anti-aliasing (nVidia - 8X). So lets see the level of quality of the image that is being shown on the screen. We will use PowerVR's Villiage Mark test, that we have used previously. Lets look at two specific areas that show a difference in AA and ansio.
Looking first at the AA test we see that there is very little difference between the three cards without AA enabled. With the various levels of AA enabled (16,8,4) we see that the Parhelia comes out on top but only by a slim margin. If you look at the landscape in the background on the 5900 Ultra and the Parhelia, you can notice that the Parhelia has just a smoother image. The Radeon 9000 is in last place in this test with its maximum of 4X AA.
Moving to the ansiotropic filtering of the cards, with it disabled the Parhelia has better filtering. You can notice that the ground seems 'bumpier' on the Parhelia without ansiotropic filtering even enabled, otherwise both of the other cards look very similar. With ansiotropic filtering enabled, we see that in this part of the image the Radeon 9000 doesn't really do much if any filtering, due to its adaptive design. The Parhelia's 2X ansio looks slightly better than its trilinear filtering. The Radeon 9800XT has extremely good ansiotropic filtering as at 16X it is much better than any of the others we have tested so far. The 6X AA is pretty nice, looking better on more horizontal lines (horizon) than the 8X of the 5900U but worse with a more vertical line (rooftop). Overall I am very impressed with ATI's AA and ansiotropic implementATIon on this card.
Drivers
We will not look too much at the drivers for the ATI, simply because we have looked at them quite a bit. We will look at two features that are pretty new with the latest drivers, that of SmartShader and OverDrive. First we will look at SmartShader and what it does.
The top left picture gives you an indication of the options that SmartShader offers. Basically it allows for an effect to be placed on the existing image that is rendered. Two examples are porthole which is the bottom left picture and classic which is a Sepia filter basically. An interesting addition, that shows off the power of the Radeon 9800XT, as it only loses about 7-10% of its frame rate at highest settings in UT2003. Next is OverDrive, and overclocking tool that is automATIc in its increasing of the clock speed. In our testing its performance was about halfway between stock and our overclocked settings. This is thus a good tool for novice overclockers as it is ATI approved.
Test System
| CPU: |
Intel Pentium IV 2.4C (12*200MHz)
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| Motherboard: |
MSI 865PE Neo2-FISR
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| Memory: |
2*512MB Corsair TwinX4000 |
| Hard Drives: |
40GB Seagate Barracuda IV 7200RPM, 2*80GB Maxtor SATA 7200RPM
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| Video Card: |
Matrox Parhelia 128MB (200MHz/250MHz) |
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MSI NBox FX5900 Ultra-VTD 256MB (450MHz/425MHz) - (500MHz/475MHz) |
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ATI AiW Radeon 9000 Pro 64MB (275MHz/270MHz) |
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ATI Radeon 9800XT 256MB (419MHz/354MHz) - (459MHz/385MHz) |
| OperATIng System: |
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 1 w/Direct X 9 |
| Drivers: |
Parhelia 1.04.03.005 |
ATI Radeon 9800XT - Catalyst 3.10 |
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MSI NBox 5900 Ultra-VTD - 45.23 |
ATI AiW Radeon 9000 Pro - Catalyst 3.7 |
| Cooler: |
Vantec AeroFlow |
| Case: |
CoolerGuys Windtunnel IV |
| Power Supply: |
RaidMax 400Watt Power Supply |
| Software: |
Fraps 2 |
| Direct X Benchmarks: |
Unreal Tournament 2003 (HardOCP 2.1 software Antalus Demo) |
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Max Payne 2 - Part III Level 8 opening |
Splinter Cell (Beyond 3D Demo) |
| OpenGL Benchmarks: |
Jedi Knight II Jedi Outcast (time demo) |
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Serious Sam SE (Little Trouble) |
Spec Viewperf 7.0 |
We have used an equal number of OpenGL and DirectX benchmarks. For OpenGL we have Jedi Knight II taking care of the Quake III engine games, Serious Sam SE with its own OpenGL implementATIon and Spec Viewperf in the professional area. For DirectX we have decided to take a look at a new DirectX 9 benchmarks Max Payne 2. Otherwise we are using the common UT2003 benchmark in flyby mode, using the one of the most demanding maps, dm_Antalus, as well as the Splinter Cell Oil refinary demo.
UT2003, Splinter Cell, Jedi Knight II, Max Payne and Serious Sam SE were all run at 1024*768 and 1600*1200. For all but the Parhelia there were also 4X AA and 8X ansiotropic filtering results included in these tests, while the Parhelia used 16X FAA and 2X ansiotropic filtering. All games, minus UT2003 had Fraps running in the background to capture the actual fps for each second, saved to a text file. For Max Payne 2 we used the start of the last chapter of the entire game, which has quite detailed images as well as fog effects and fire as well. We can consider this to be a fairly demanding test of the video card, and is video card limited for the most part.
NEXT
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