Games Benchmarks - Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (DirectX)
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness is currently still one of the few titles to utilise much DirectX9 functionality in the game. Here we'll be using our own internal benchmark demo.
| TR:AoD (FPS) | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x960 | 1600x1200 |
| X700 XT | 145.1 | 117.2 | 81.0 | 63.2 | 39.0 |
| X700 PRO | 134.6 | 108.8 | 70.1 | 52.1 | 34.7 |
| X800 XT | 162.0 | 154.7 | 121.8 | 99.2 | 73.4 |
| X600 XT | 108.4 | 77.2 | 45.8 | 31.2 | 21.4 |
| 9800 PRO | 157.9 | 118.6 | 75.8 | 54.7 | 34.6 |
| X700 XT % Faster Than: | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x960 | 1600x1200 |
| X700 PRO | 7.7% | 7.7% | 15.6% | 21.3% | 12.3% |
| X800 XT | -10.5% | -24.2% | -33.5% | -36.3% | -46.9% |
| X600 XT | 33.9% | 51.8% | 77.0% | 102.5% | 81.9% |
| 9800 PRO | -8.1% | -1.2% | 6.9% | 15.7% | 12.8% |
| X700 PRO % Faster Than: | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x960 | 1600x1200 |
| X800 XT | -16.9% | -29.7% | -42.5% | -47.5% | -52.7% |
| X600 XT | 24.2% | 41.0% | 53.2% | 66.9% | 62.0% |
| 9800 PRO | -14.7% | -8.3% | -7.5% | -4.6% | 0.4% |
Our Tomb Raider test makes some more use of shaders in some areas than the other games tests used so far do, hence the performance is more reliant on the boards pixel shader processing capabilities, than bandwidths - given that all these boards utilise the same basic pixel shader architecture this basically comes down to the number of pixel pipelines and clockspeeds. As such we see that the X700 PRO is performing closer to the 9800 PRO than in previous cases, despite its lower bandwidth. The X700 XT also outperforms the 9800 PRO by as much as nearly 16%.
| TR:AoD, 4x FSAA + 8x AF (FPS) | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x960 | 1600x1200 |
| X700 XT | 110.7 | 83.3 | 58.0 | 39.6 | 26.4 |
| X700 PRO | 97.2 | 72.7 | 48.1 | 34.4 | 22.8 |
| X800 XT | 145.8 | 118.5 | 91.5 | 71.2 | 50.8 |
| X600 XT | 73.3 | 49.0 | 30.9 | 20.0 | 9.9 |
| 9800 PRO | 112.2 | 79.3 | 53.7 | 34.4 | 22.5 |
| X700 XT % Faster Than: | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x960 | 1600x1200 |
| X700 PRO | 13.9% | 14.5% | 20.4% | 15.2% | 15.6% |
| X800 XT | -24.1% | -29.7% | -36.7% | -44.4% | -48.1% |
| X600 XT | 51.0% | 69.9% | 87.3% | 97.9% | 165.6% |
| 9800 PRO | -1.3% | 5.0% | 8.0% | 15.1% | 17.5% |
| X700 PRO % Faster Than: | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x960 | 1600x1200 |
| X800 XT | -33.4% | -38.6% | -47.4% | -51.7% | -55.1% |
| X600 XT | 32.5% | 48.4% | 55.6% | 71.8% | 129.8% |
| 9800 PRO | -13.4% | -8.4% | -10.3% | -0.1% | 1.6% |
With 4X FSAA and 8x AF the relative performance differences between the X700's and the 9800 PRO are about the same, despite 4X FSAA requiring more bandwidth - this is likely because the increased texture sampling requirements of 8x AF are offsetting the X700's performance a little due to the X700's texture optimisations that can't be utilised on 9800 PRO. The performance difference between the two X700's is a little greater in this case because the X700 XT has a higher bandwidth to fill-rate ratio than the PRO and this is useful for FSAA.
