C&C Generals: Zero Hour Performance no AA/AF

The recently released expansion to the very popular Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game Command & Conquer Generals seems to do a good job of living up to the standards set by its prestigious ancestry. RTS games usually get overlooked in GPU roundups and comparisons as they aren't considered graphically intense. However, smoothness is very important to gameplay; goodness knows I've blamed plenty of lost armies on ill timed drops in framerate. For this benchmark, we created a multiplayer game consisting of 6 hard armies on one team with us, and one easy army. We then used the replay feature in conjunction with FRAPS to measure performance. This was done with and without 4X AA/8X AF

At 10x7, with no AA/AF, C&C is CPU limited, and the performance of the ATI cards is all but identical. The NVIDIA cards trail the ATI cards by about 20%, and they seem CPU bound as well.

C&C Generals: Zero Hour Performance 4X AA/8X AF

We can see some separation in the ranks when we turn on up the juice. Basically, we see the RV3x0 based cards fall off in performance to where the NVIDIA cards were without AA/AF.

The NVIDIA cards drop off in performance as well, but the 5600 Ultra is able to maintain its speed a little better than the Ti 4200.

Aquamark3 Performance EVE: The Second Genesis Performance
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  • BerSerK0 - Friday, January 30, 2004 - link

    I have a 9600XT, and real life FPS on these games are much better :)
  • xxZoDxx - Sunday, December 28, 2003 - link

    My $.02... Constantly listening to the bickering of ATI vs nvidia, it's like Ford vs Chevy, & Pepsi vs Coke. My feelings on this? nvidia has superior hardware. Now before you get your ATI underoos in a bunch, ATI has the superior Drivers/architecture. Look at most openGL benches. Don't they follow the clock, RAM, and bandwidth speeds more closely? nvidia mostly holds all these cards. If they could only get their drivers to work as well with D3D, there wouldn't be a question. Congrats on the latest 50 series but they still have a way to go to get D3D up to snuff. Personally? I have a 5900 that o/c's like mad (well beyond 5950) and I only paid 2 bills for it. ATI... get the pricing down and you could OWN nvidia. Now I wait for the flamers..........
  • TurtleMan - Tuesday, December 23, 2003 - link

    Hmm FFXi is a main factor for me , and now i have an unopen 9600 xt sitting right here, i began to wonder if i should open it up or buy a 9800 se..
  • Rustjive - Wednesday, October 22, 2003 - link

    The FFXI benchmark is heavily CPU bound in addition to being GPU bound. Case in point: I ran it on my duallie PIII-733 with the TI4200, and I barely got over 1200 rendered (compared with the 3000+ of Anandtech's results.) Then contrast this to Aquamark 3, in which I got 13.03 FPS as opposed to the ~15FPS of Anand's. (Comparatively, the performance differences are quite drastic.) All I have to say is...blah to FFXI and the world of MMORPGs. Blah.
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 21, 2003 - link

    Scores are bullshit, why bench the top of the line ATI 9800 XT against the middle of the road 5600? Thats just retarded.
  • Anonymous User - Tuesday, October 21, 2003 - link

    When we will see a test with ATI,s 9800 made by different manufacturers?
    Asus,Hercules,Gigabyte,ATI??
    Thank u!
  • Anonymous User - Saturday, October 18, 2003 - link

    How come they used diff. settings for every benchmark? Sometimes they used 1024X768 with no AA/AF enabled while other times they used 1024X768 w/ 4XAA/8XAF. Where did the 6XAA settings go? Can't stay consistant thorough out the review so people won't have to worry about the settings for each game benchamarks. Can anyone expalain this?
  • Anonymous User - Friday, October 17, 2003 - link

    Unfortunately this review has missed an important issue: noise levels. Simply put many of the people reading this site will have serious hearing loss by their mid 40s because these systems are too loud for the long daily exposure times people experience with them. Old programmers who were around the old line printers frequently have hearing loss from the high pitched buzzing of the printers. Ditto any other industrial noise exposures. Silent computing is a worthwhile goal! I was very disappointed to discover that the last nVidia-based graphic card I placed in my main system was so noisy. Now I need to find a quieter one that delivers similar performance. These reviews are not much help on that dimension. Sorry.
  • Anonymous User - Friday, October 17, 2003 - link

    Can you PLEASE get rid of the flash ! :(
    Whats wrong with the classic Anandtech graphs
    that everybody loved ?
    It doesnt even look better ..
  • Anonymous User - Friday, October 17, 2003 - link

    Hey #8, maybe it's because NVIDIA sucks. Even when they do match the performance of ATI, the image quality is lower anyway.

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