Direct X Performance Using Expendable
I decided to use the Expendable Demo by Rage Software. This game uses Direct3D and has a built-in benchmark that provides data regarding the average frame rate obtained during the playback of the demo. The Expendable game will be used a lot here at Tom's Hardware Guide since it supports environmental bump mapping, multi-texturing, and both 16bit & 32bit modes. Besides the built-in performance metric the game also has some incredible graphics and is also optimized for 3DNow!. All testing was done at 1024x768x16bpp.
Both Chart I & II show that TNT2 was the fastest while the Matrox G400 barely edges out the Voodoo3 for second position. Still the differences between the first three are very little, it shows that all of them have a good 3DNow!-optimization. It is easy to see and realize that no card is edging out its fill rate or triangle rate limitation in this test. The numbers are purely depending on how much work the drivers need to get done by the CPU for supplying the geometry data. In Direct3D the drivers of TNT2, G400 as well as Voodoo3 are doing a good job on using the special features of 3DNow!.
