Games Benchmarks - UT 2004 Detailed

Here we'll take a slightly more detailed look at the performance of the X700 XT and X700 PRO under UT2004.

 

X700 XT (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x960 1600x1200
Normal 66.4 66.9 66.9 66.4 57.8
8x AF 66.9 67.0 66.5 64.6 50.7
4x FSAA 67.0 66.9 66.6 61.0 37.2
4x FSAA + 8x AF 66.9 66.3 64.4 52.8 33.9
 
% Diff from Normal 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x960 1600x1200
8x AF 0.8% 0.2% -0.5% -2.7% -12.3%
4x FSAA 0.9% 0.0% -0.4% -8.1% -35.7%
4x FSAA + 8x AF 0.7% -0.9% -3.7% -20.5% -41.4%

Looking at the X700 XT’s performance here we see that it is still fairly CPU limited in many cases, so enabling 8x AF has a 12% performance hit at 1600x1200. With the separate FSAA results we can see the effects of having only 128MB of RAM, with the performance hit being only 8% at 1280x1024 and 36% at 1600x1200 as some of the textures are needing to be addressed from system RAM due to the larger frame buffer requirements of 1600x1200, thus lowering the fill-rate performance. With 8X AF enabled this performance deficit it tempered a little bit, with the performance nearly converging at 1600x1200 for 4x FSAA on and off, as more time will be spent during texture sampling, masking the bus performance a little.

 

X700 PRO (FPS) 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x960 1600x1200
Normal 65.5 66.3 66.0 64.8 49.4
8x AF 66.1 65.9 65.2 57.3 43.2
4x FSAA 67.0 66.8 64.6 49.3 34.5
4x FSAA + 8x AF 66.4 65.4 55.8 42.9 31.4
 
% Diff from Normal 640x480 800x600 1024x768 1280x960 1600x1200
8x AF 0.9% -0.6% -1.2% -11.6% -12.6%
4x FSAA 2.4% 0.7% -2.2% -24.0% -30.2%
4x FSAA + 8x AF 1.3% -1.4% -15.5% -33.8% -36.4%

Looking at the detailed performance of the X700 PRO we see that the maximum performance penalty for enabling 8x AF is about 13%, 4x FSAA 30% and both together 36%. The X700 PRO has less bandwidth in relation to its fill-rate than the X700 XT does, which probably accounts for its larger performance hit when enabling 4x FSAA (before 1600x1200).