Dungeon Siege

Dungeon Siege is another fairly recent DirectX title, again predominantly utilising the DX7 feature set.

The game uses a 3D card detection scheme which enables or disables certain options dependant on the capabilities of the card. Because Radeon 9700 PRO is a new device it was not included in the detection list and hence would run at the default settings; however, ATI supplied a new card detection list thus giving a profile for Radeon 9700 PRO. Having looked at the list of options I did not notice any appreciable differences between Radeon 9700 PRO's profile and other recent boards that would skew the results.

When previously benchmarking with this title it's been noted that it seems to be fairly CPU limited, though the first thing that we noticed is that at 640x480 the Radeon 9700 PRO has a 35% performance advantage over Radeon 8500. With fill rate not likely to be an issue at low resolutions for either board this could signify that the extra geometry processing power of Radeon 9700 PRO is giving this title a boost.

As we move up the resolutions, the Radeon 8500 drops off a little in performance while Radeon 9700 PRO nigh on stays completely CPU limited (or geometry), only dropping off 2FPS at 1600x1200. At 1600x1200 the Radeon 9500 PRO is over twice as fast as the Radeon 8500.

With the various elements of anisotropic filtering and FSAA applied under this tile the fill rate graph look rather boring because the 9700 PRO still remains very CPU/geometry limited, with its fill rate barely batting an eyelid. At 1600x1200x32 with 4XFSAA and 16X Quality Anisotropic filtering enabled, the 9700 PRO is still running at 70FPS, just 7FPS lower than its normal rendering mode and nearly twice as fast as Radeon 8500's normal rendering!