Super7 Video Accelerator Comparison - Part 2: Mid-Range Gaming Solutions (June 99)

Direct3D Performance

For months now, there hasn't been a decent Direct3D game that could measure performance accurately. Shogo is probably one of the worst benchmarks ever used on AnandTech as a Direct3D benchmark, however it was the best/only option for quite some time. At the same time, Incoming/Forsaken were quickly growing to be beyond highly outdated benchmarks, luckily Rage Software, the makers of Incoming, included a nice benchmark in their latest release, Expendable (which is a pretty cool game actually). Unfortunately Expendable is very CPU dependent and isn't the best way of comparing one card to another, nevertheless it is the best thing to benchmark Direct3D with currently, so we'll have to use it. The game to keep an eye out for is Unreal Tournament, if Epic includes a decent benchmark in UT, you can expect that to become the next Direct3D game used for benchmarking.

To run the Expendable benchmark, simply run the go.exe file with the '-timedemo' extension, i.e. C:\Expendable\go.exe -timedemo. All Expendable benchmarks were performed with bumpmapping turned off, and texture detail set to high. The performance illustrated by the Expendable demo did not vary greatly between 16-bit and 32-bit color, making the results redundant, and therefore only 16-bit color tests were shown. At the same time, the performance drop vs resolution increase was negligible, making 1024 x 768 - 16 bit color the only performance represented.

Expendable provides a nice method of judging performance in spite of its incredible CPU dependency. Every benchmark is outputted with a highest, lowest, and average FPS score. Therefore, a single set of Expendable benchmarks can provide you with the same information, albeit for Direct3D, as demo1.dm2 and crusher.dm2 would for Quake 2 (in OpenGL).

The results pretty much indicate that the G400MAX is the fastest Direct3D performer out of the bunch, followed by the 3dfx and NVIDIA contributors with a close second. You'll start to notice a larger drop in performance as you proceed from the Millennium G400 (regular) down to the Savage4 PRO+. Keep in mind that a difference of a few FPS in Expendable translates into a much larger real world performance drop.