LOSTCIRCUITS |
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ASUS V6600 GeForce 256
No Holds Barred
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(Review by MS, Nov. 28 1999)
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Quake2
Only one comment here, we did it, we broke the 200 fps barrier
QuakeII frame rates for demo1 (with and without sound) and Crusher (with sound). Please note that at 1024x768 the frame rates for the Athlon are identical to those obtained with the P!!! and at 1280x960, there is no more difference between any of the CPUs / settings. That is, the K6-III runs as fast as the Athlon, limited by the fill rate of the V6600. Also note that the presence of a sound card only causes a performance hit where the CPU performance is the limiting factor. The numbers clearly show that either the fill rate of the V6600 or else the bus bandwidth limits the performance at high resolutions.
QuakeIII Arena Test
At low resolutions, the Athlon V6600 screams but falls way behind at the high resolution settings.
QuakeIII frame rates for demo1 and demo2 at different resolutions / quality settings. If you remember the scores of the K6-III at 1280 x 960, you see that at this resolution it is actually faster than the Athlon. Keep in mind however that QIII involves huge amounts of textures and that is where the AGPx1 limitation fully plays out the handicap.
The interesting fact about all Athlon benchmarks turns out to be that the low resolution settings are taking off above anything we have seen on another system, whereas high resolutions produce results that are comparable with the K6-III or even below. The explanation is most likely in the drivers. As mentioned above, the Athlon requires special drivers in order to run the GeForce stable and stability in this case has been bought with disabling AGPx2. Therefore, there is a bottleneck in the data transfer from CPU to GPU. At lower resolution, it doesn’t really matter since the bandwidth is still enough to throughput the excessive power of the Athlon. At high resolutions, however, the bottleneck really starts slowing things down below the capabilities of the Athlon and the GeForce. Getting these drivers out has been a good start but we can expect some more improvement once these limitations have been eliminated, hopefully in the next revision.
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