Dungeon Siege

The next game we'll use is the DirectX title, Dungeon Siege

Dungeon Siege has usually proven itself to be a CPU limited title in many occasions on modern cards, yet in this case the fill-rate graph clearly shows that it's getting reasonably fill-rate limited on the Parhelia, at least beyond 1024x768. At 1024x768 the performance of the title is well above 60 FPS, on average, but at 1600x1200 it's sunk below 60, but still well above 30 FPS.

As we saw with Max Payne, there have been some modest improvements in the drivers under this DirectX title, albeit fairly small.

Again we can see that adding 2X Anisotropic filtering is taking between 9% and 15% in performance. Quite bizarrely, though, the worst of the performance decreases are coming at low resolutions where it's not fill-rate limited. With the filtering enabled the performance is still above 60 FPS at 1024x768 and well over 30 FPS at 1600x1200.

In this title FAA is accounting for between 17% and 24% of a performance decrease, which is slightly less than in Max Payne, probably because the title isn't as fill-rate limited. Unlike the Anisotropic filtering performance, we can see that FAA is taking a larger performance drop at the higher resolutions, which is what we would normally expect. The performance here is just over 60 FPS on average at 1024x768 and still above 30 FPS at 1600x1200.

As with Max Payne, enabling both FAA and Anisotropic Filtering gives a slighty more balanced performance decrease with the total drop not being cumulative.