Back to Page 2 In 2004, we saw some sims coming into their own after some rough starts. As’Weasel_Keeper’ says, “Wings Over Vietnam and Strike Fighters: Project 1, Service Pack 3 are doing very well. ‘Cat’ and Andy Bush were on the original beta team and probably wouldn’t recognize SFP1 and WOV since they moved on to other projects.” […]
Back to Page 1 ‘Cat’ saw the year this way… “Simming-wise, I think FreeFalcon 3 was a big thing. Also, Pacific Fighters’s release. Lock On 1.1 should get a mention, though it won’t be actually out till the first part of 2005”. ‘Cat’s’ Preview for Flaming Cliffs is here and here. Read Chris ‘BeachAV8R’ Frishmuth’s Combined Review and Mission Report on FreeFalcon3 here and Tom […]
by Doug “guod” Atkinson Another year has come and gone in sims. What were this year’s highs and lows and which sims were the year’s best? Fact is, in a gaming environment proliferated with a near obsession of grabbing the last visual effect from $300-500+ video cards, many of us spent the year playing sims […]
Back to Page 4 Image Quality As a derivative of the R420 architecture, the X700s also support programmable multisampling modes of anti-aliasing. A sparse sampling pattern is defaulted to when the feature is enabled via ATI’s driver panel, identical to that of the X800s. And temporal AA, the changing of the sampling pattern used […]
Back to Page 3 Far Cry benchmark numbers are generated by repeated playings of the Research map, which consists of an good mix of beach, jungle, and interior settings found throughout the game’s various levels. Fraps is used to record performance as the same path is taken through the map during each test and all […]
Back to Page 2 Benchmark Scores For comparison purposes a Radeon X800 XT is also included to allow an analysis of how each title in the test suite is or isn’t affected by the significant performance differences of the two boards. And with this in mind, testing was conducted with in-game settings configured at […]
Back to Page 1 X700 Architecture Overview As previously mentioned, the X700 graphics chips are based on the same architecture as the X800s and are thus identical in terms of features supported and functionality as that of the faster parts. While the X700 graphics chips have half the pixel pipelines they do still offer […]
by John Reynolds Introduction The online gaming and hardware communities have a rather strong preoccupation with performance, a focus that emphasizes the high-end of product markets. Thus attention is predominantly given to the more expensive parts that attain the highest scores, that push existing systems to new levels of performance. Boutique vendors such as Falcon […]
Back to Page 3 Last is NASCAR Racing 2003 Season, tested using a crowded Daytona track and a camera view set inside of Earnhardt’s cockpit. Graphics settings were also configured to medium options and shadows disabled. NR2003 displays a difference between the two systems that consistently stays at just under 5% between the scores generated. […]
Back to Page 2 Falcon 4 performance testing again used the FreeFalcon 3 upgrade mode with SimHQ’s in-house test of a low level, air-to-ground flight that consists of two Falcons using Mk20s and Mavericks. Graphics options, however, were left at their highest settings since the title can hardly be considered as stressful to the test […]
Back to Page 1 Benchmark Scores The Comanche 4 benchmarking demo was run with texture compression and hardware shaders enabled and sound disabled. A piece of software that has traditionally scaled very closely with CPU speed, the C4 demo gives the P4 3.46 and 925XE chipset almost 10% across the tested resolutions, barely cracking the 80 […]
by John Reynolds Introduction When Intel introduced the Prescott processors this past summer the event was received by the online hardware and gaming community with less enthusiasm than what past Intel launches have garnered. Manufactured using Intel’s 90nm process, the Prescotts did not exhibit the traditional benefits of new fabrication techniques, which have been reduced […]
