Quake3 Quaver

Having remembered how poorly Quaver ran during testing for the Vivid! KYRO review, the first thing that struck me in these tests was that Vivid!XS KYROII was not behaving at all similarly; so much so that I began to wonder if this was really a 32MB board, or if I accidentally still has texture compression enabled. However, neither of these things turned out to be the case, it's just that strides have been made, even in the last two months, in the development of the drivers that facilitate the use of AGP transfers more effectively.

The performance of the Quaver demos appears to maintain a pretty healthy pace all the way up to 1280x1024. The performance hit for enabling 32bit textures (which pushes the texture quantity into system RAM) is reasonably acceptable as well; and is only seems to really become an issue at 1280x1024 to 1600x1200. Once again we see that the FSAA performance rate never drop below their increased fillrate requirements suggest they should; the maximum penalty for 2X FSAA being 46%, and 4X being 66%.

The comparison between Vivid! KYRO and Vivid!XS KYROII once again shows pretty much the type of performance increase we would expect. If, however, you compare the Vivid! scores here with the Vivid! review two months ago it clearly illustrates the development of the drivers; for instance in the Vivid! review 1024x768x32 scored an FPS of 37.9, whereas now it gets 52.1 FPS with the newer drivers!