Radeon X1300 Pro - X1600 XT & X1800 XL/XT
By:
Hilbert Hagedoorn |
Edited by | Published: October 4, 2005
Chronicles of Riddick - Escape from Butcher Bay
Year 2004 finally delivered two of the most awaited and anticipated games: Half Life 2 and Doom 3. Before that Far Cry dropped the bombshell on the gaming industry, totally redefining graphics and gameplay standards. When we thought we had seen it all, Starbreeze and Vivendi delivered the unhyped and low profile game Chronicles Of The Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. The game was first released on the Xbox without too much buzz, noise or publicity. The game was then ported to the PC with buffed up graphics. The game starts with Riddick taken to the prison. Riddick is supposed to be one of the most wanted criminals in the galaxy. Riddick is like an icon in the game. The most fearless, dashing and feared criminal in the whole galaxy. The storyline is not the same as that of the movie; in fact it's entirely different. It starts somewhere in the past in context to the two movies that we saw on the big screen.
You will need a pretty powerful machine to run this game at its full glory. The game has shader model profiles for different graphic adapters. So make sure you choose proper shader model before you start playing the game. On machines with Geforce 6 series of cards, the game auto detects Shader 2.0+ but this is unplayable on most machines even with the mighty 6800U graphics card. And many times the game will simply lock up. So make sure you set the Shader Model to 2.0 or lower according to the setup.
The lighting effects in this game are very good and real looking. All models cast shadows properly. Gun modeling is also good. And the game uses some 3rd person views, especially when you are in conversation, climbing onto boxes, hanging on to something or when you are climbing ladders. During this you will notice how well the Riddick is modeled and how good and natural his body movements are. This really shows how well the game engine is working and how much effort was put into making good graphics.
Small sidenote, we use our own recorded timedemo here. For those that don't know, a timedemo is simply recording a piece of the game that you play. That piece that you recorded is then used to playback that scene. This way you can objectively measure the framerate with any graphics card, of course with the same parameters and settings.
Ehm, NVIDIA cards OWN this game in terms of performance right now. Why ? Because it's an OpenGL title. Let's have a look at another OpenGL title .. Doom 3.
Shader 2.0++ mode enabled.
Doom 3
At the 2002 E3 exhibit ID Software showed of DOOM 3. Days after that the world was shocked as somehow that demo got leaked onto the Internet. It's now 2004 and the game has finally been released! The breathtaking realism of the Doom III engine basically depends on two features; a realistic physics engine and a unified lighting scheme that incorporates detailed bump-mapping and volumetric shadows. Hardware older than GeForce 4/3 lack the flexibility and power to run Doom 3 with detailed features at an acceptable frame-rate. The engine is once again written in OpenGL.
DOOM 3 sports a brand spanking new game engine that's a marvel to see. The amount of special effects that master programmer John Carmack has whipped up show us environments that we've heard about but have never seen before. ID has made an engine that specializes around the type of game they made: dark, scary, and intense. The game takes place on a base on Mars in the year 2145. The environments will give you a feeling of claustrophobia, which is only heightened by the game's dark atmosphere. Every light in the game is cast by some actual light source somewhere. If there's no lights on in the room, you'll see literally nothing and will need to turn on a flashlight. Shoot out a light in the middle of a battle, and you'll need to fight blindly. Sometimes, graphics do truly contribute to atmosphere as well as gameplay and with DOOM 3 it's obvious that id understands this better than most game developers.
In a weird way it's almost impossible to fully describe what the game looks like, but needless to say it’s well beyond anything to date. Multi colored per-pixel lighting on bump-mapped surfaces. Each and every object in the game, including the teeth of the monsters you fight cast dynamic shadows, but not the jagged kind you may’ve seen in other recent games. The shadows are done using Carmack’s own algorithm. I’m sure many of you have upgraded specifically for this game, but it appears as though the video card is by far the most important piece of hardware needed. Even at the lowest resolution with the lowest amount of detail it looks jawbreaking.
Oy, you can forget about the X1300 Pro with HQ settings. The X1600 XT does decent enough numbers and the X1800 XL is playable in all resolutions for sure. This is one of these titles that always has and will be favoring NVIDIA cards.
However, Doom 3 can be played absolutely fantastically without any need to sacrifice on its image quality on any modern graphics card starting in the mid-range price class.
When looking at AA and AF tests (below) in combination with the game's high quality mode the gap closes a little, yet the NVIDIA cards remain the leader here except .. and this I find interesting .. the X1600 XT.
I rechecked the results a few minutes ago and the chart numbers are correct. There is something slightly different going on here. It's crawls in front of the GeForce 6600 GT. And if you look closely there was only a marginal difference between the standard and then the AA/AF results. So please ignore the 4xAA and 8xAF results you notice in the chart above for the X1600 XT. It's most likely a bug, I will check this out for sure.
The 7800 GTX wins from the X1800 XT with a large margin, a 13 FPS difference.
Very nice. Right, I think I've shown you enough to get a good idea of the products discussed today. Next page please. We are going to wrap up this review.
** Update October 15th - Added Doom 3 scores with AAMemMapSwitch
I received an email from one of my contacts over at ATI earlier yesterday, he was pretty excited. The email was called .. "ATI wise men discover secret of ~35% performance boost in Doom 3 at high resolution with high AA". Heh .. okay. So basically ATI's driver team did some driver loving on for OpenGL with a regard to texture mapping. Whatever it does precisely is not 100% explained (yet) they title it as ‘clever memory management’ though.
Eric Demeres from ATI just lit shed a little light on it though:
“This change is for the X1K family. The X1Ks have a new programmable memory controller and gfx subsystem mapping. A simple set of new memory controller programs gave a huge boost to memory BW limited cases, such as AA (need to test AF). We measured 36% performance improvements on D3 @ 4xAA/high res. This has nothing to do with the rendering (which is identical to before). X800's also have partially programmable MC's, so we might be able to do better there too. Basically, discovering such a large jump, we want to revisit our previous decisions
But It's still not optimal. The work space we have to optimize memory settings and gfx mappings is immense. It will take us some time to really get the performance closer to maximum. But that's why we designed a new programmable MC. We are only at the beginning of the tuning for the X1K's.
As well, we are determined to focus a lot more energy into OGL tuning in the coming year; shame on us for not doing it earlier.”
The general consensus in most X1K reviews was that ATI should be feeling some shame regarding it's OpenGL performance. So they found a way to generate a substantial performance increase once you have Anti-aliasing enabled. Interesting, I received that patch file from ATI and decided to give it a quick spin.
What we did was enable 6xAA and 16 levels of AF to make it hard for the card. And the patch did not show any performance difference at all. Now that was weird ... no effect whatsoever. Now have a look at 4xAA and 8xAF:
Oy .. there we go. Image quality remained the 100% same as far I can see. The performance difference on our (custom) timedemo was 20% at maximum. Now that's still quite amazing. We'll run some more tests today as I want to learn why this is so 4xAA specific.
Now the patch is presented for Doom 3, but in theory this coule very well be a generic OpenGL performance optimization along the line of OpenGl games. Very interesting.
** update (2) .. I ran a number of (quick) preliminary tests. It seems thast the patch is very specific for the 4xAA mode only, perhaps another site can confirm this:
Doom 3 - 2xAA 0xAF
8x6
10x7
12x10
16x12
Standard
107
97
75
56
With AAMemMapSwitch
106
96
74
54
Performance over default %
99%
99%
99%
96%
Doom 3 - 4xAA 0xAF
8x6
10x7
12x10
16x12
Standard
92
74
51
37
With AAMemMapSwitch
98
80
59
43
Performance over default %
107%
108%
116%
116%
Doom 3 - 4xAA 8xAF
8x6
10x7
12x10
16x12
Standard
91
73
51
36
With AAMemMapSwitch
97
80
59
43
Performance over default %
107%
110%
116%
119%
Doom 3 - 6xAA 0xAF
8x6
10x7
12x10
16x12
Standard
84
67
47
33
With AAMemMapSwitch
84
67
47
33
Performance over default %
100%
100%
100%
100%
Doom 3 - 6xAA 16xAF
8x6
10x7
12x10
16x12
Standard
83
66
46
33
With AAMemMapSwitch
83
66
46
33
Performance over default %
100%
100%
100%
100%
The test was run on another Athlon 4000+ system with 1 GB memory (slower timings than upper results) and a Radeon X1800 XL 256MB. At the moment we are not allowed to distribute the patch yet ATI made clear that this will be included in a public release of Catalyst driver.
I'd love to have this test done with the X1800 XT yet that card was returned to ATI already.
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