December '97 3D Video Accelerator Comparison

Determining how well a 3D Video Accelerator performs naturally requires a method of benchmarking, deciding upon how to benchmark the card requires much more thought however. While there are a number of benchmarks out there that claim to be effective 3D Graphics Tests, in reality there is no substitute for a real world 3D gaming test when dealing with a 3D gaming card.  Ziff Davis produces a benchmarking suite known as Winstone, it is used here on Anand Tech as well as on other sites and in magazines.  Winstone itself is nothing more than a compilation of the latest and most popular Business and High End applications, a true real world test that makes it such an effective measure of system performance. 

Unfortunately, there are no such tests produced by Ziff Davis to measure 3D performance.  You may ask, what about 3D Winbench?  Although 3D Winbench is a well manufactured test, it doesn't accurately reflect real world 3D performance, in addition to that simple driver enhancements can often boost 3D Winbench scores while not increasing performance at all.  For these reasons, Anand Tech will only use real world games and their built in benchmarks to compare the performance of all of the 3D Accelerators featured here.  Comparing performance under the OpenGL API isn't all that difficult, id Software's Quake 2, serves as an ideal benchmark since it is a very intensive test that makes beyond adequate use of a combination of the Video Subsystem, Processor, and Memory of a computer.  Shortly a few more titles based on the Direct3D API will emerge, most of which feature frame rate tests, upon their release one will be chosen as the official benchmark of Anand Tech, until then we'll have to live with Quake 2 frame rates for now.

All cards tested here either used their own beta OpenGL drivers, or those included with Quake 2, listed below are any and all third party drivers that were used in the tests:

• ATI Xpert@Work (AGP) - ATI Beta OpenGL Drivers

• NVidia Riva 128 based Cards - NVidia Riva 128 Beta OpenGL Drivers

• Rendition Verite V2x00 based Cards - V2x00 Miniport/ICD

The Pentium II test system consisted of a boxed Pentium II - 300, AOpen AX6L Motherboard, 64MB Advanced Megatrends SDRAM, and a Western Digital 1.6GB HDD.  The Socket-7 test systems used either an AMD K6 233, Cyrix 6x86MX 200+ (clocked at 66 x 2.5), or a Pentium MMX 233 on a FIC PA-2012.

Now let's take a look at the first benchmarks...