Benchmarks II
We'll now delve into a couple of games with a little greater detail. Firstly, Serious Sam: The Second Encounter. It's the Sierra De Chiappas Demo from the publicly available demo. Settings are quality with anisotropic filtering disabled until we require it. To begin preceedings, no anti-aliasing or aniso'.
The similar scores at 1024x768x32 tells us that we are heavily subsystem limited. The Crucial Radeon flexes its muscles as we run up the resolution scale. The high scores obtained here tell us that high-end video cards have no problem with this demo. But what effect will image-enhancing features have on our scores ?. Let's see as we raise the image quality bar with 2x FSAA and 4x anisotropic filtering.
Here is where the Crucial Radeon really shows its strengths. We're getting nigh-on 60fps at 1600x1200x32 with 2x AA and 4x AF. Compare this with the 27fps for the Ti 4600.
Putting the hurt once more, let's see what effect 4x FSAA and 8x AF has. This looks gorgeous but is it playable ?.
Sitting through the demo, 1600x1200x32 with 4x FSAA and 8x AF looked surprisingly smooth, even more so when the Crucial card was overclocked to 353/652. The Ti 4600 gave up the ghost fairly quickly with these performance-sapping settings.
