32 Graphic Card Meltdown - Part Two

Benchmark Results - Descent 3 OpenGL - 640x480x16

Quick note: This is where things will start to get ugly. Most cards don't support OpenGL very well and if they do, it's to run Quake2/Quake Arena. This is why I was a bit happy to do these benchmark runs. It's really annoying when a driver is optimized for one or two games. It makes it tough for game developers to support a good API like OpenGL if video card drivers "cut corners" to get performance.

With the comfort of using it's native API, the Voodoo3 cards take the top spots with ease. We have the TNT2's and the ATI cards performing pretty damn well at this point while the Savage4 boards struggle to even keep 30 FPS. Unfortunately the i752 is already out of the competition BUT at least it worked! The G400 cards have issues in D3 while using OpenGL. The screen would go blank on me and seem to run fine (without video output). The strange thing was that at the end of the runs I still got a score. This is the case in all testing resolutions. Having no clue as to the legitimacy of the scores, I still failed the cards. I'm not going to tell you how a card performed if you can't even see video. Even so, the card has crappy performance according to the score it output. I find it annoying that the Matrox OpenGL driver isn't quite as sharp as the DX driver and even more so that the driver won't run a non-Quake engine based game in OpenGL. Every other card was able to pull it's own, why not the G400?