NVIDIA's GF4 Ti4200 Vs. Radeon 8500LEs
From Apollo Graphics and ATi
Mainstream Graphics Cards Do Battle...

By - Marco Chiappetta
April 11, 2002

We've looked only at DirectX performance thus far and found that the Radeon 8500 LEs have lagged behind the GeForce 4 Ti 4200 in every test.  Next we'll move onto some OpenGL testing.  First up are the obligatory Quake 3 Arena timedemos.

OpenGL Benchmarks with Quake 3 Arena Benching with the Oldies!

In these tests, we set Quake 3 to "High Quality" mode,  maxed out the texture and geometry sliders and enabled trilinear filtering, before running the time demos (Demo001).  The GeForce 4 Ti 4200 is still untouchable at every resolution but I doubt many of you would complain about playing Quake 3 at 1600x1200 at over 80 FPS on a Radeon.  Even though the Ti 4200 is faster, the Radeon is by NO MEANS slow.  Now it is time to enable AA.

OpenGL Benchmarks with Quake 3 with AA More GL Tests

We enabled 2X AA (again in performance mode on the Radeons) and ran timedemos at the same resolutions.  The Ti 4200 was still the performance leader, but what struck me most was the huge performance hit the Radeons took.  The Radeon's framerates dropped about 50% across all resolutions, while the Ti 4200 hovered between 20% and 30% until we hit 1600X1200. The story remains the same with 4X AA enabled, but notice that all three cards defaulted to 2X AA at 1600x1200.

More Quake with Anisotropic Filtering