benchmarkin info

muppy

Newcomer
I've seen here
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1910
anandtech used those benchmarks:
Tomb raider angel of darkness
Command and conquer: zero hour
EVE: The Second Genesis
F1 Challenge '99-'02
Final Fantasy XI
GunMetal
Halo
Homeworld 2
Neverwinter Nights: Shadow of Undrendtide
Tron 2.0
Warcraft III: Frozen Throne Performance
X2
any instructions how do benchmarks using those games?
Any info about tecnologies used in those games?
Thanks
Andrea
 
Don't have complete info handy, but I can give you a start on a few:


muppy said:
...
Tomb raider angel of darkness
Can potentially use PS (pixel shader) 2.0 shaders heavily for a large variety of graphical features (as well as PS 1.4 and PS 1.1/1.3).
Different settings and effects activated based on card, so need to specify each individual setting directly for comparing benchmarks between cards. Can also use Cg as an option, I believe.
Note: recent patches removed the standard benchmarking feature.
...
GunMetal
Can use PS 1.1/1.3 (don't know about PS 1.4) for graphical features, and apparently uses VS 2.0 (vertex shader) for some speed up.
There used to be some floating point processing usage for a version released for nVidia to demonstrate Cg, but that seems to be removed from the commercial version (AFAIK).
Don't know how well it allows equivalent benchmarking in terms of the issue of turning on/off features based on an installed card.
Can use PS 2.0, PS 1.4, PS 1.1 for graphical features...all rather heavily.
Picks based on detected card and driver version, but doesn't report it easily in game (AFAIK), so you have to use a command line to specify it along with the benchmark mode, to try and keep things equivalent.
Adding "-use20 -timedemo" (or "-use14" or "-use11" for pixel shaders, "-useff" to not use them, substituted as appropriate) to a shortcut to "halo.exe" is how to benchmark.


Those are the titles I'm familiar with off the top of my head.

For benchmarking in general:

AFAIK, you currently can't get trilinear filtering under Direct3D for nVidia cards (FX at least) in current drivers.
Also, there is reduced AF for additional texture stages (or texture layers, as I think of them). Not sure how the new "Application Preference" options interact with this.

For ATI, control panel "Quality" mode only applies trilinear filtering to the first texture stage, and bilinear (with full AF otherwise) to other stages. To get trilinear on all stages, you need to use "Application Preference" which lets the Application decide, or activate a hidden control panel mode that applies trilinear filtering to all stages (rTool is an easy tool to do that).

Both are inherently misleading when comparing to IHVs (hopefully XGI and PowerVR some time soon, at the least) that don't have such shortcuts (if that's something that matters to what you are looking at), except for ATI when using "Application Preference". Also, trilinear filtering's benefit is not something that is often easily visible in still screenshots, it is primarily evident in motion with high contrast and high detail textures. This is important when evaluating how its presence compares to its absence in return for the performance hit it introduces.
 
I found this page at Nzone, describing some of the effects demalion was referring to for GunMetal.
Cg Specific Graphical Features:

Cg support for all materials
Cg: 'Motion Blur' effect for the plane, proportional to speed
Cg: Realistic 'Water Refraction' effect
Cg: Further effects under consideration
DX9: 'Occlusion Query' for optimised rendering and realistic flare effects
DX9: Use of 128bit floating point buffers, enabling use of high contrast colour and overflows (such as retina bleach)
Which means that the high contrast effects, using floating-point buffers, is available via DX9. Hopefully there are no Nvidia-only effects in the game.
 
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