Tomb Raider - Angel Of Darkness
There is a lot of discussion around this new Eidos game at the moment. It is one of the first DX9 games that come with a build in Benchmark option. The benchmark option was already built in the release version v42 and was extended in the version v49, which also brought a lot of performance improvements and bug-fixes. Eidos retreated the patch after and replaced it last week (although the Eidos site says September 03) with the version v52 - without a benchmark option. Probably because of pressure from NVIDIA, who does not like this benchmark.
The 3D-Engine is very configurable and is very hard to set up for apples-to-apples comparisons. We tried to find a configuration applicable to all cards (See here and here ).
The game did not render anything with the old NVIDIA v44.03 driver so we can only show the scores of the actual v45.23 drivers. Here ATI won hands down while even the 9600 Pro can beat the FX 5900 Ultra. This is a situation that reminds us of the Half-Life 2 benchmark numbers.
