Dungeon Siege

Dungeon Siege is a DirectX title, which mainly makes use of the DirectX7 feature set.

 

FPS 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
GeForce 4 Ti4600 89.9 90.0 89.1 85.1 77.3
GeForce FX 68.8 69.0 67.7 67.2 67.0
GeForce FX (400/400) 68.2 68.3 66.9 65.3 63.6
 
% Diff from Ti4600 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
GeForce FX -24% -23% -24% -21% -13%
GeForce FX (400/400) -24% -24% -25% -23% -18%

Dungeon Siege is quite a CPU intensive title in the first place, and not so much limited by a boards fill-rate, and here we can see that the GeForce4 Ti is outperforming the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra again, presumably due to a more stable and optimal driver code base or there may be some additional load that from something that GeForce4 handles better in hardware where the 5800 needs some CPU support. The 5800 running at 400/400 and 500/500 are performing vary similarly, with a small expectation at 1600x1200, which shows that this isn't down to fill-rate. Curiously, the increased Vertex performance of the 5800 is not assisting here, whereas we have seen that strong hardware geometry processing does assist the performance of this title.

 

 

GeForce FX 5800 Ultra 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
Normal 68.8 69.0 67.7 67.2 67.0
8x Aniso 62.6 62.8 62.2 60.3 59.2
4X FSAA 59.0 56.8 53.7 47.6 34.4
8x Aniso + 4X FSAA 57.7 57.2 53.6 45.9 33.5
 
% Difference 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
8x Aniso -9% -9% -8% -10% -12%
4X FSAA -14% -18% -21% -29% -49%
8x Aniso + 4X FSAA -16% -17% -21% -32% -50%

Seeing as this title is not largely fill-rate bound we wouldn't expect to see a huge performance decrease for enabling 8x AF, and in this case the maximum penalty is 12%. With 4X FSAA enabled we can see a reasonable drop in fill-rate (or bandwidth) performance at 1280x1024, and the fill-rate graph indicates that it's limited at and beyond these resolutions. Adding 8x AF on top of 4X FSAA accounts for only a small further drop in performance.