Testing DirectX 10 capable cards on DirectX 9.0 games can be very misleading. If you are dropping $400 on a new card odds are you're not interested in two year old games or ones based on two year old technology.
Just why is it that the ATI 2900XT is out performed by its equivalent GeForce 8 series counterpart in most gaming benchmarks but in an Unreal Engine 3 based benchmark it out performs the highend nVidia 8800GTX by a significant margin?
Just why is it that the ATI 2900XT is out performed by its equivalent GeForce 8 series counterpart in most gaming benchmarks but in an Unreal Engine 3 based benchmark it out performs the highend nVidia 8800GTX by a significant margin?
SourceRight now there are only two notable games released for the PC that utilize Unreal Engine 3, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and Rainbow Six Vegas (as above). Yet online reviewers prefer to use games such as 'Battlefield 2142', instead of a more modern alternative like GRAW.
This is a very surprising conclusion, the 8800GTX is higher priced than the 2900xt and rightly so, it is meant to be a highend card and outperforms the 2900XT on all benchmarks, but when UE3 is added to the equation it is left in the dust.
This may be because UE3 is very much enhanced to run on the 2900XT, given the 2900XT shares a lot with the Xbox 360 GPU and Epics dedication to optimising UE3 for the 360 GPU it could very well be that some of that optimization has carried over to the 2900XT.
Many high profile next gen games will be using UE3, the only other graphical power house that will be coming soon is Crysis and benchmarks for that are non-existant. As it stands the 2900XT may be sub par for older games, but for newer ones that are utilizing UE3 (at the least) it is in a league of its own. The price difference between the 8800GTX and the 2900XT is not to be scoffed at either, it is an amazing deal.
Rainbow Six Vegas is not even a DirectX 10 based game though it is a newer game than most others that are benchmarked and it clearly is swinging in the 2900XTs favor. The typical nVidia vs. ATI thing shouldn't be declared over until these cards are tested for what they're made for.
Even in the past this has been shown, especially with ATI cards, the 9700XT was outperformed by the 5700 Ultra (or matched) in many older benchmarks (for its time), however in newer games it was far superior to its counterpart. This may or may not hold true for the 2900XT however it is a little premature to call nVidia the winner based on games like Battlefield 2142.
VIA techy.Bytes
Update: Anandtech ran the same benchmark producing less spectacular results:
SourceThe 2900XT isn't out performing the 8800GTX but it is pretty much performing on par with it outpacing its direct nVidia rival.
11 comments:
UT3 is coming out for PS3 this year, the 360 version of UT3 wont be out until 2008. PS3 uses Nvidia hardware. I think your claim here is null. How does HD2900 stack up agains the 8800 GTX in Rainbow six vegas @ 1600x1200 w/ 4x aa 16x af? Fook 1024x768, who the fuck games at that resolution now adays?
Its also funny how another review company has the game runing many FPS faster at the same resolution on a REGULAR GTX, not the XXX overclocked version. See here for comparison.
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2895&p=4
I trust anandtech over legitreviews anyday.
77.8. Much more in line w/ the HD2900. Plus thats on old driver version, as well as none overclocked and non ultra board :)
[img]http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/video/RSV/highqualhighend.png[/img]
@Jeremy
Thats well and good but the link you've provided is comparing the 1950xt (not 2900xt) to the 8800GTX/
You make as many assumptions about uses of the cards as the review sites. Many gamers do buy new cards to play the latest games, but they also have favorites from several years back. Consider games like Counter Strike that is old, but one of the most popular games on the Internet. Another example would be World of Warcraft. That games was released several years ago, but continues to be one of the most played games. My wife bought a Mac Pro with an ATI 1900 just for WoW.
Some gamers are willing to spend money to make their favorite game even better. I expect new cards to meet or exceed performance for older games. Even a budget card should be able to compete on two year old games.
The only thing your post demonstrates is the need for diverse benchmarking. Hardware sites should use a few older games using different engines as well as new cutting edge games.
Ummmmm NO!...
See here...
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2988&p=22
wow, way to be completely wrong. Neither GRAW nor Vegas are UE3... GRAW is it's own engine and Vegas is UE2+mods. But even if they were, UE3 is a DX9c game, not DX10...
@James
You're right, but the emphasis of this article was whether or not testing new cards using old games should be allowed. In this case were talking about new cards being tested with old games.
When newer games are used the difference is less than one would expect if they only looked at the old ones.
From the article: "Rainbow Six Vegas is not even a DirectX 10 based game though it is a newer game than most others that are benchmarked and it clearly is swinging in the 2900XTs favor. The typical nVidia vs. ATI thing shouldn't be declared over until these cards are tested for what they're made for."
Also Rainbow Six Vegas and GRAW use unreal engine 3 tech, they aren't running on top of UE3 but they use a bit of its primary technology.
Great point, I overlooked that fact. However with a lack of quality of driver support ATI is starting to lose my interest. Plus the 8800 GTS out performed or was on par (the 640mb flavor) in games like Rainbow Six Vegas on several review sites. Plus the 8800 GTS series runs about 50 dollars cheaper; so we'll have to wait and see
If you plan on doing this in any type of professional manner I suggest you brush up on your spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Simply using MS Word would have helped.
UT3 is not a DX 10 game. It entirely supports DX 9c, and I believe Mark Reign (producer) has repeatedly stated that most graphical improvements are not DX 10-centric.
Matthew said...
If you plan on doing this in any type of professional manner I suggest you brush up on your spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Simply using MS Word would have helped
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o im surry dud i not spill correctly?
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