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HOW WE
CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM:
We tested the
Asus V9950 Ultra on an i875P "Canterwood" based MSI 875P
Neo-FIS2R motherboard, powered by a Pentium 4 3.0CGHz CPU
(800MHz Bus). The first thing we did when configuring this
test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "High Performance
Defaults". Then we set the memory to operate at 200MHz
(Dual DDR400), with the CAS Latency and other memory timings
set by SPD. The AGP aperture size was then set to 256MB.
The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP
Professional with SP1 was installed. When the
installation was complete, we installed the Intel chipset
drivers and then hit the Windows Update site to download and
install all of the available updates, with the exception of
the ones related to Windows Messenger. Then we installed
all of the necessary drivers for the rest of our components
and Windows Messenger was disabled and removed from the
system. Then Auto-Updating and System Restore were
disabled, the hard drive was de-fragmented and a 768MB
permanent page file was created. Lastly, we set Windows
XP's Visual Effects to "best performance", installed all of
the benchmarking software and ran all of the tests. All of the benchmarking was done
with ATi's and NVIDIA's drivers configured for maximum
visual quality. ATi's "Quality" Antialiasing and
Anisotropic filtering methods were employed throughout our
testing, while the Performance slider available on NVIDIA's
"Performance and Quality" driver tab was set to "Quality".
For the "4X AA + Aniso" tests listed in our
graphs, we enabled 4X AA and 8X Anisotropic
filtering in both NVIDIA's and ATi's driver panels.
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HotHardware's Test Setup |
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It's
the Top of the Line! At Least For Now! |
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Common
Hardware:
Intel Pentium 4
Processor 3.0GHz / 800MHz System Bus
MSI 875P Neo-FIS2R
512MB (256MB x2) Corsair XMS3200C2
Seagate Barracuda V 7200 RPM SATA 120GB Hard Drive
Common
Software:
Windows XP with SP1
DirectX 9.0a
Intel Chipset Software v5.00.1012
Intel Application Accelerator RAID Edition v3.0
Video Cards
Tested:
Asus V9950 Ultra - GeForce FX 5900 Ultra (256MB)
Leadtek WinFast A350 TDH MyVIVO - GeForce FX 5900 (128MB)
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (128MB)
Video Drivers
Used:
ATI
Catalyst Drivers v3.6 - WHQL Certified
NVIDIA Detonator FX Drivers v44.67 & v45.23
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Performance Comparisons
With
Gun
Metal |
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DirectX 9.0 Gaming |
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We began our
testing with the DX9 based Gun Metal benchmark developed by
Yeti Studios. This benchmark, like all of the others
used in this review, is based on an actual game engine. In
fact, this game is included with the V9950! Gun Metal
uses Vertex Shader 2.0 and Pixel Shader 1.1 ops in the
creation of the game world. This test is heavily GPU
limited, and because Yeti's intent was to stress all modern
3D accelerators, Antialiasing (2x) and Anisotropic filtering
are enabled by default, and cannot be disabled.
The V9950 Ultra handled the Gun
Metal benchmark quite well. At both resolutions the
V9950 Ultra was the highest performing card when the v45.23
Detonator FX drivers were used. At 1024x768 and
1600x1200 the V9950 was about 10% faster than the
Radeon 9800 Pro, and about 4% faster than the standard 5900. We have also included some scores from a
GeForce FX 5900 "non-Ultra" running the older v44.67 drivers
to illustrate the performance differences between the older
and newer set of drivers. It seems like the v44.67
drivers gave Gun Metal a significant performance boost.
More DirectX
Testing... |