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Eye Candy:
Below are a couple of screenshots
from Comanche 4, a great DirectX based game, and Serious Sam
The Second Encounter set to run in OpenGL. For the fun of
it, we turned up all the visual quality settings with
Comanche4 running 4X FSAA and Serious Sam SE running 4X FSAA
as well 32-Tap Anisotropic filtering enabled. Even with the visual
quality set to maximum, both games were quite playable.
How playable you ask? Well, we'll get into that a little
deeper in the benchmarking section of the review.
In the meantime, check out the pretty pictures!
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Overclocking
the
eVGA
e-GeForce4 Ti4600 w/ACS |
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Turning Up The
Heat... |
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Now we've come
to my favorite part of the review where we get to see how
fast we can push a new piece of hardware. To get
started, we installed the latest version of "Coolbits" and
started pushing the card beyond the norm. Starting out
at 300MHz. core and 650MHz.(DDR), we began pushing the GPU
until it wouldn't take anymore. In this case, we were
able to achieve a stable 320MHz. core speed before the card
would randomly lock up. Then we moved on to the RAM
and started pushing it as high as we could managing to reach
an impressive 730MHz.(DDR). All-in-all, not a bad
showing, increasing the output of the GPU by 6.66% and the
memory bandwidth by 12.30%.
Next we'll fire up the Hot
Hardware test system and square off against some intense
DirectX and OpenGL benchmarking utilities to see what the
eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti4600 is made of.
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HotHardware Test Systems |
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AthlonXP All the
Way!! |
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Shuttle AK35GT2/R
Motherboard
AMD AthlonXP
1800+.
256MB Corsair XMS2400
(2-2-5-2)
2 IBM GXP 60 7200RPM
40GB HDs
eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti4600 w/ACS - 300/325
ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 8500 - 275/275
nVidia
GeForce3 Ti500 - 240/250
Creative 52X CD-ROM
Standard Floppy Drive
Windows XP Professional
DirectX 8.1
Detonator 28.32
ATI Display Drivers Ver. 6.13.10.6043 |
A Few
Words About The Benchmarks:
To help our readers understand how we achieve the scores
that we do, we feel it is necessary to explain our methods. After installing a fresh copy of Windows
XP and downloading all updates with Windows Update, we
installed the Detonator 28.32 reference drivers from nVidia. By default, Windows XP loads the desktop
with the best visual appearance settings, which could
adversely affect the benchmarks. With our test system,
we set the desktop settings for "best performance" to
reduce any unnecessary load. Next, we went into the
video card driver settings and set both OpenGL and
Direct3D to "Best Performance," and disabled "Vertical
Synch." To give a frame of reference, we compared the
benchmarks of the eVGA Ti4600 with an ATi All-In-Wonder
Radeon 8500 and a GeForce3 Ti500. |
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Benchmarking With
3DMark2001SE |
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The DirectX
Approach. |
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3DMark2001 SE:
To kick things
off, we loaded up MadOnion's 3DMark2001SE and gave the eVGA
e-GeForce4 Ti4600 a chance to show us what it could do.
In this test we ran the benchmark at three popular
resolutions, at default and overclocked speeds. As with all
the tests, we compared the results to an ATi All-In-Wonder
Radeon 8500 and a GeForce3 Ti500.
Talk about dominating a test,
the eVGA e-GeForce4 Ti4600 took a solid lead over the two
comparison cards, easily beating ATi's latest and greatest.
At 1280x1024 the Ti4600
maintained its lead, dropping roughly 16.5% while the Radeon
dropped nearly 20%. While overclocked, the Ti4600
increased its score by 2.3%.
At 1600x1200x32, the Ti4600
ruled the roost, besting both reference cards easily. As a whole, overclocking the
Ti4600 had a minor effect on the DirectX benchmark, but
we're not finished yet. Next we'll turn up the heat
with a few rounds of Comanche4.
More
Benchmarks With Comanche4 & Serious Sam SE
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