NVIDIA Puts Its (New) Cards on the Table

Tomb Raider - Angel Of Darkness

This new game from publisher Eidos is currently a hot topic - and not necessarily in a good way. Tomb Raider AOD is one of the first DirectX 9 games with an integrated benchmarking feature. This was already present in the release version (v42) and was improved in the first patch (v49). In addition to fixing several bugs, the patch also improved in-game performance. Interestingly, Eidos retracted the patch shortly afterward ( rumor has it after being pressured by NVIDIA). Last week, the patch was finally replaced by a new one (v52) - which conspicuously lacks a benchmark option. Eidos incorrectly quotes September 3rd as the release date for this patch on its homepage.

The 3D engine of this game offers a plethora of settings and allows for highly detailed configuration - making it difficult to find a setting that is fair to both NVIDIA and ATi cards. We have tried to use comparable settings in our test (found here here and here ).

ATi's Radeon 9800 XT in this test, coming in behind the Radeon 970 Pro, soundly beats the FX 5950 Ultra. The FX 5700 Ultra plays in the same performance league as the Radeon 9600 Pro. The 9600 XT benefits from its better shader performance, which is a direct result of its higher core clockspeed.