| It's time to
do the bench thang ... |
Benchmarks
At this part of the review you must be a bit bored by all the technical
info right. Okay, it is time then to do some numbers. I have
benchmarked the MG400 with several programs like X-Bootmark, King pin,
Final Reality and 3D mark MAX on a common used (PII 350 MHz/128MB @396
MHz)
system.
First up is a little global comparisation between cards from the same
generation with several benchmarks between , Voodoo 3 and TNT-2,
TNT-2(a) and of course the MG400.
| |
V3
3000 |
GA-660
TNT2 |
GA-660+ |
GA-MG400 |
| FINAL
REALITY |
46.9 |
47 |
47.5 |
47.7 |
| X
BOOTMARK |
16.9 |
15.8 |
18.5 |
18.3 |
| WIZMARK |
61.6 |
59.2 |
59.2 |
46.7 |
| 3D
MARK 99 MAX PRO |
34.27 |
34.8 |
35.11 |
35.7 |
| King
pin 1024x768 |
38.1 |
35 |
40.6 |
30.4 |
Results are pretty good. As you can see
the card really shows itself in D3D apps and games and performs in some
instances even better than that unbeatable Voodoo3 3000. the card is definably
faster than your standard TNT-2 based card. What worried me a bit was
the performance in King pin. Obviously the current drivers have not been
OpenGL optimized the way they should have been, because results should
be, could be and will be faster in the near future. The drivers that we obtained were in 1.0 beta stage.
This week 3DMark 2000 was released. This
cool benchmarking tool gave a total score of 1460 points for the voodoo3
3000 and a score of 1466 for the MG400. believe me when I say, this
benchmark will bring any card down to its knees, but it draws a nice parallel
on performance.
King Pin
It's time to do some 16 vs. 32 Bit benchmarking. The next benchmark is a timedemo benchmark
done with kingpin.
(Poison.dm2) to see how the Mg400 would handle framerate in several
resolutions.
| Kingpin |
|
|
|
|
800x600 |
1024x768 |
1600x1200 |
| 16Bit |
32.2 |
30.4 |
13.8 |
| 32Bit |
32 |
19.5 |
n/a |
We where able to play kingpin in 16 Bit
1600x1200 mode, it halted in 32Bit due to the lack of 16megs onboard
memory. The MG400 has a hard time with this game, scores are below
average. In 32Bit you can clearly see a drop of FPS in 1024x768. In
800x600 however the results are nihil.
At first this was the only 16/32Bit
performance benchmarking that I wanted to use. However, since I expected
that the OpenGL are far from finished, i compared the D3D results from
3DMark. The results are in this graph below:
| 3D
MARK |
800x600 |
1024x768 |
1280x1024 |
1600x1200 |
| 16Bit |
3570 |
3540 |
3229 |
2326 |
| 32Bit |
3579 |
3475 |
|
|
Well, again the limiting
factor for benching 32Bit performance in higher resolutions was memory.
With a triple buffer test you won't even reach 1280x1024/32. However,
watch the lines from 800x600-1024x768 and compare them with the results
from the kingpin benchmark. There is clearly better performance in 32bit
with D3D games.
Well, point taken and proved, the OpenGL drivers need some tweaking to get
the best out of the MG400. We'll just have to wait until the next
driver-update comes along.
Coming up: Overclock
that thang
|
