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| Benching
the Gladiac |
| The
fastest frame rates money can buy
right now. |
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DVD
Playback and Digital Video Performance:
Let's
ease into the testing side of things here, shall
we? First we wanted to see what this card
can do from a pure "couch potato" point
of view. Watching a good flick couldn't be
more relaxing and mindless and that is right up
our alley after a hard day in the lab. Mad
Onion's Video 2000 takes into account not only a
card's ability to playback Digital Video but also
the quality in which it is reproduced. All
tests were done on the P3-866 machine.
Video
2000 Mark - P3-866
Ladies
and Gentlemen, you are looking at the new King of
DVD playback here. The GeForce2 GTS driven
Elsa Gladiac even bested our former in house
champ, the ATI Rage Fury 128 Pro. Image
quality and performance scores were far and away
better. The only area that the GeForce2 GTS
lagged slightly was features and it was within a
few points of the ATI card. You can compare
notes in our Video 2000 DVD Playback round-up.
Our fun was over
and it was time to get to work on more challenging
3D rendering. Once again, we decided to set
things up for our testing, with both the high end
and mainstream systems represented. First
we'll show you scores with our P3-866 and i820
system and follow up with a taste of a more
mainstream set up using a P3-600E and BX chipset
based motherboard. Let's look at the
perennial 3D card torture test, 3DMark 2000 from Mad
Onion.
3D
Mark 2000 Test - P3-866
click
for full view
The
batch runs that we do with 3DMark are like running
the 3D Gaming Gauntlet for a graphics card.
The test takes over 2 hours to complete and puts
the card through just about every stress test and
frame rate measure you can think of. The
Gladiac didn't even so much as hiccup throughout
the entire run. Needless to say, the
Hardware T&L supported scores represented here
are the fastest we have produced to date.
Even without T&L it turned in the best frame
rates we have ever seen in this test.
Moving
on to a real world Direct 3D benchmark, we have
Unreal Tournament scores for you. Again,
these particular tests were done on the
P3-866/i820 system.
Unreal
Tournament - Flyby Timedemo
Frankly
folks, we are struggling with what real game
benchmark is a decent measure of Direct 3D
Graphics Performance these days. Clearly,
Unreal Tournament is heavily CPU dependant and the
fact that from 640X480 16 bit color to 1024X768 32
bit color, the scores only vary about 5 fps,
doesn't give us the feeling that the benchmark is
very efficient. Even a time demo in the game
"Expendable" from Rage Software exhibits
the same type of rather flat curve. We're
looking into Direct 3D benchmarks more and will
move to a different test suite if we find
something better. In any event, 68 frames
per second at 1024X768 in 32 bit color, was a
pleasure to play and looked beautiful.
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