Dungeon Siege

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

Dungeon Siege has often shown itself to be quite a CPU limited title and while we can see this is the case in the lower resolutions, as the resolution scales beyond 800x600 we can see a fill-rate limitation as well. Given the nature of the title, an average performance of 47 FPS at 1024x768 is reasonably good, and the board is still averaging above 30 FPS at 1600x1200. The FPS graph shows a better fill-rate performance at 1600x1200 than at 1280x1024, which would indicate some settings are being lowered.

Because the title is quite CPU bound at the lower resolutions the performance difference between 3X FSAA and no AA starts off at around 43% deficit, and increases to 74% at 1600x1200.

The fill-rate graph shows an almost consistent drawn pixel difference throughout all the resolutions, however, the actual FPS difference decreases as the resolution increases. At 1024x768 the 1.8GHz P4 system is over 30 FPS and just under at 1600x1200.

Oddly, in this instance, as the resolution gets higher there is a worse performance difference between AGP4X and AGP8X modes.