Benchmarks
As noted in the test system setup section, the Athlon 64 3800+ being reviewed is installed on a ASUS A8V motherboard, which is based on VIA’s K8T800 chipset and supports AGP 8x. Unfortunately, after weeks of trying to obtain a faster graphics board, the best AGP card available to us at the time of testing was the Xtasy 9800 Pro listed above. For this reason, only lower resolutions were used during testing.
First up is the Comanche 4 benchmarking demo. Though several years old, this piece of software has consistently remained one of the most CPU-limited titles on the market, refusing to lose more than a few frames even when tested across a wide range of resolutions. Texture compression and hardware shaders were checked in the demo’s options.
Even years after its release, it never ceases to amaze watching this demo refuse to move away from being almost 100% limited by the CPU
Lock On: Modern Air Combat was tested using the MiG-29 Intercept demo. Again, several settings such as water were dialed back since they have such dramatic impact on the game’s performance. The Intercept demo was ran until the six minute mark.
The 9800 Pro is clearly limiting Lock On’s performance in this playback, with such a substantial frame rate loss between the tested resolutions. This is the rare flight simulation that scales well with faster graphics boards.
Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2004 has proven itself to be fairly stressful on even high-end hardware when its options are dialed to the max. SimHQ’s demo is a dusk flight over the city of Hong Kong, which gives a good combination of water, wooded hills, and buildings. The demo is ran with the Spot Plane view active and the camera set directly behind, and frame rate recording is halted upon landing. The option Ground Scenery Casts Shadows was disabled during testing.
This is obviously another simulation that was limited by the test system’s graphics card, losing over 20% performance between the two resolutions.
The IL-2: Sturmovik Forgotten Battles – Aces Expansion Pack represents SimHQ’s non-modern flight simulation test. Using OpenGL rather than D3D, the landscape option was set to perfect. Testing consisted of using Fraps to record the frame rate during the first two minutes of the Bf109 Introduction training demo.
While losing over 33% performance between 640×480 and 1024×768 resolutions, IL-2 FB AEP still churned out a high frame rate.
