VGA Charts II: High-End Systems

The Test

The tests were conducted under Windows XP SP1 with an Intel Pentium 4 and an ASUS P4PE (i845PE), as well as an AMD Athlon XP 2700+ on the ASUS A7N8X Deluxe (nForce 2). Both systems were equipped with 512 MB RAM (DDR 333 - 2/2/2/5). Happily enough, all 29 of the cards ran stably. Only the SiS Xabre cards proved to be a bit uncooperative in Aquanox when used with nForce2.

The oldest cards in the test are the NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 and the Radeon 7000/VE. The Kyro II cards could not be tested with the motherboards we used because of their 3.3V AGP voltage - and the same was true of the Voodoo 5 5500, which had been requested by many readers. In the forthcoming Part II of the VGA Charts, where older chipsets will also be used, these cards will be included.

It wasn't easy deciding which games and benchmarks to use for the VGA Charts. The cards were tested with their standard settings at a resolution of 1024 x 768-32. Tests involving FSAA and anisotropic filtering will be included in Part II. In Aquanox, DirectX 8 cards have a big advantage - as their performance increases, the game runs faster. It's a different picture with Jedi Knight II and Dungeon Siege. Here, the CPU performance becomes a limiting factor starting from a specific point, where faster cards can no longer make full use of their advantages. Also, Jedi Knight II represents the newest of the games based on the Quake 3 engine. A game that relies heavily on the performance of the card itself is Unreal Tournament 2003 (Antalus Flyby). And to wrap things up, there's 3D Mark 2001 SE, which, however, makes known its preference for NVIDIA cards. Here, ATI's R300 cards couldn't gain so much ground agains the NV25/28 cards, as they do in the games Unreal Tournament 2003 and Aquanox. GeForce4 Ti4200 and 4600 showed just about a 10% performance difference from one another, whereas in the other games mentioned above, they were a good 20% apart.

A last word on the Xabre cards: when their standard settings are used, the SiS driver uses texture quality that is less sharp in order to attain better performance. Because of this, the rendering quality of the Xabre boards is significantly lower than with ATI and NVIDIA cards, as illustrated by the screenshot from Aquanox below.

Test Setup