Benchmark Expectations
With the obvious raw fill-rate disadvantage, I expect to see the Radeon take some losses in 16-bit color and in low resolutions. However, I do feel that we'll see a few ties or minor wins at the higher color depths and resolutions due to the Hyper Z technology. T&L benchmarks should be very close as both NVIDIA and ATI are claiming some serious numbers when it comes to their respective hardware implementations. Let's take a look now at the tests to see what the story really is.
Test hardware noted with an '*' notes that the board was unable to run the given test due to memory or driver issues.
Benchmark Results
Benchmark Results - Quake 3 Arena Demo001
Although the Radeon doesn't take a commanding lead at our Quake 3 16-bit tests, it does manage to do a decent job staying with the rest of the pack. Only the mighty GeForce2 towers over it at this point.
Things start looking up for the Radeon as the benchmark goes into High Quality mode and the resolution rises. You can see the efficiencies of HyperZ start to kick in as the Radeon gain a tremendous amount of ground quickly when the resolution goes up.
