NVIDIA GeForce4 - NV17 and NV25 Come to Life
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 6, 2002 8:51 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter
When Serious Sam was released it instantly become a benchmarking favorite, courtesy of Croteam's attention to detail when it came to making their engine as configurable as possible. The Second Encounter is a direct evolution of the original Serious Sam title with an even more stressful set of options within the engine. We ran the benchmark using the publicly available demo version of the Second Encounter with the demo's built in extreme defaults enabled. The only exceptions that were that anisotropic filtering was disabled as was Truform on all ATI cards to prevent unfairly penalizing their performance.
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764.77As a prelude to the actual performance benchmarks we'll use Serious Sam's built in synthetic test to give us an idea of what sort of fill rates we should expect the various cards to be pushing. Here we can see that the GeForce4 Ti 4600 comes out with a 36% higher fill rate than the GeForce3 Ti 500 which will definitely translate into a real world performance improvement, especially once we start getting into more memory bandwidth limited situations.
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Here we notice that there are some serious issues with the latest drivers for the Radeon 8500 and Serious Sam as we know the cards should be performing much, much better than they are here.
What's interesting to note is that the Ti 4600 is not only able to offer a 36% higher fill rate than the Geforce3 Ti 500 but also push 39% more polygons than the previous generation flagship. This means that regardless of whether the situation is fill rate/memory bandwidth limited or geometry limited, the Ti 4600 will be able to produce significantly faster results than even the high-performing Ti 500.
We won't spend too much more time on what to expect however and we'll just dive into what we actually ended up seeing...
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The first thing we've got to talk about before we even touch on the GeForce4 is the Radeon 8500. ATI's latest beta drivers, although fixing a number of problems in arguably more important benchmarks (e.g. UPT2002), have reduced performance significantly under Serious Sam. As you can tell by the above performanc echart, the Radeon 8500 drops from where it normally resides between the GeForce3 Ti 200 and the GeForce3 down to the level of the GeForce2 Ti 200. ATI is approximately a month away from shipping a WHQL certified version of these drivers (v7.66) which should hopefully have all of the kinks worked out.
Moving on to the GeForce4, now we're able to see this card shine. The Ti 4600 is an astounding 39% faster than the GeForce3 Ti 500, while the Ti 4400 still holds an impressive 26% lead over the previous flagship.
The GeForce4 MX doesn't perform all too well in this test, only to be outperformed by the GeForce3 Ti 200. It seems as if the two pixel pipeline limitation is actually visible in this and other newer games causing the new MX series to lag behind a bit.
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Moving on to 1280 x 1024, the Ti 4600 is exactly 50% faster than the GeForce3 Ti 500. Normally with every sequential GPU release we notice small and arguably significant performance improvements, but this is proof alone that the GeForce4 is much more than NVIDIA has ever put forth in their very successful reign.
The GeForce4 MX 460 remains just below the GeForce3 Ti 200 with the Radeon 8500 clocking in just below it. With updated drivers the Radeon 8500 could easily pull ahead to the level of the GeForce3, however we'll have to wait a little while longer for those.
The GeForce4 Ti 4200 should offer performance somewhere in between the GeForce3 Ti 500 and the GeForce4 Ti 4400 although we didn't get enough time to run a quick set of benchmarks at the 225/500 clock speed.
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We finish off with scores at 1600 x 1200 where the Ti 4600 isn't able to make 60 fps which isn't bad considering that the old flagship GeForce3 Ti 500 can't break 40 fps. The rest of the cards clearly can't cope with the higher resolution as it does take the incredibly fill rate and memory bandwidth of a card like the GeForce4 Ti 4400 or 4600 in order to run at 1600 x 1200 relatively smoothly.
We'd still opt for a lower resolution in order to get a higher frame rate and one that's more consistently above 60 fps.
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