LOSTCIRCUITS |
|
ATI FIRE GL 8800
... with gasoline |
| (Review by MS, June 22, 2002) |
Let The Games Begin
I mentioned in the beginning that many of todays gaming cards by far exceed the capabilities of last years professional graphics cards, prime example is the GeForce 4 4600, at least in some applications. Lets start with those benchmarks that are derived from games or are game demos and give the GeForce4 a head start, or not?
Probably the best known OpenGL "household application" is Quake in its various iterations. Can a card designed for OpenGL keep up with the latest gaming monster from nVidia? The answer is once again that it doesn't have to and was never meant to and the frame rates show it.
Quake3 Arena, Normal: 640 x 480
Quake3 Arena Demo_four fps scores for all of our test systems compared to the ASUS P4S533 using the ASUS V84600. The slowest system again is the MP platform and even running Quake3 in SMP mode which, contrary to common belief is possible does not get the scores anywhere near the competitors. Again, the main reason appears the memory bandwidth limitation but it should also be possible to improve the situation since we have gotten much better scores in SMP Mode even with the Radeon (R-100). Key message of this chart is, however, that the gaming world belongs to the gaming cards as the GF 4600 successfully demonstrates.
3DMark 2001SE
One of the arguments we made earlier for the FireGL 8800 has been that the card as a spinoff of the 8500 series is fully DX8.1 compliant. This allows to use the FireGL in a much more universal way than any high-end OpenGL-only workstation or graphics card but how does it compare to the GF 4600.
Unfortunately, there are no surprises here either, the GF 4600 is the undisputed leader. On the other hand, there is nothing whatsoever wrong with the FireGL scores either, it is memory bandwidth that counts in the final instance.
CodeCreatures
You simply have to see it to believe it, Codecreatures is blowing me away everytime I watch it but the FireGL still has no chance against the Ti 4600. For comparison sake, here are a few other numbers, e.g. the RADEON 8500 comes out with a whopping 13fps on the Dual AMD platform and the Ti 4600 gets up to 31 fps on either the A7V333 or the A7M266D. It is floating point, vertex and pixel shaders that take over and reduce bandwidth requirements.
Ok, so we know that the FireGL 8800 is not the top gaming card out there. We also know its capabilities in OpenGL applications but what we still don't know is how, e.g. the Ti 4600 fares in a head to head race in the very same OpenGL scenarios we went through before. For simplicity sakes, we only show the scores on the ASUS P4S533, don't worry, we ran them all and could fill another 20 pages but who would read them anyway?
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