Halo - Combat Evolved

Well, the legendary Halo. I remember the first time I watched the E3 2000 video of Halo. It was awesome, far better than anything I saw before. Learning about Halo coming first on Xbox was a big disappointment. It took long for Halo to come out on PC, so it lost much of the excitement it created once.

Anyway, let's see what we did with Halo. Halo uses Pixel Shader 2.0, 1.4, or 1.1, whatever is available on your hardware. We noticed sometimes Halo decides to use a lower Pixel Shader version, even PS 2.0 is supported on hardware. It is fairly easy to solve that problem by forcing the game to use PS 2.0 with -use20 command line parameter, so we did that. We also included only DirectX 9 level hardware for this test. Sound was disabled and video quality settings were set to maximum, as usual.

A note for our readers: Halo timedemo produces different results when run in first time and second time, so if you are running just one test to get a result, you are getting wrong numbers.

As the numbers clearly show, Halo is very demanding on hardware. The mighty Radeon 9800XT and FX 5950 Ultra are barely able to get near 60 fps level. Forget playing Halo at 1600x1200, as even the fastest cards are having trouble running the game at that resolution.

Halo does not support anti-aliasing, as it renders the scene to a texture maps instead of Direct3D back buffer. That is no big deal, as no current hardware would be able to run Halo with anti-aliasing enabled, we guess.

GunMetal

GunMetal created some interest with its NVIDIA Cg features when it came out last spring, but the popularity have quickly worn off. The game employs some really impressive graphics, but the gameplay is lackluster, and performance leaves lot to be desired.

GunMetal has a seperate benchmark application, and it contains two different demos for testing. We enabled 4x anti-aliasing in this benchmark, and used both demos at 1024x768 resolution. DirectX 8 and 9 level cards are presented in the graph.

All that crazy visual effects combined with 4x anti-aliasing creates a big pressure on video hardware. If you want to play GunMetal, our recommendation is disabling anti-aliasing, but using a higher resolution.

Splinter Cell

Splinter Cell is another game which has problems using anti-aliasing, so we only used plain 1024x768 and 1600x1200 resolutions with that one. For benchmarking Splinter Cell, we used Beyond3D's excellent Splinter Cell benchmarking demos. Splinter Cell is able to run on a wide variety of graphics cards, but only DirectX 9 level hardware is included in our tests.

Finally Radeon 9800XT finds a game to show its muscle. We admit that the charts are quite boring, as the ranking in 1024x768 and 1600x1200 is similar. It's sad to see even FX 5700 is not able to provide a smooth gameplay in Splinter Cell, if you want to experience the maximum visual quality.

Conclusion

That concludes our quaterly benchmark round-up of graphics cards. The results bring no surprises, as both the Radeon 9800XT and FX 5950 Ultra demonstrate the performance expected from theirselves. These two are surely kings of the hill at the moment, and it is not possible to declare one of them the clear winner.

All the FX 59xx cards perform very close to each other, so aggresively priced 5900XT seems to be a good choice. On the ATI side, often neglected Radeon 9800 is quite satisfactory, but we believe you can find some bargains when shopping for a 9800 Pro, so we recommend focusing on that one.

If you are looking for a middle range card, your choices are Radeon 9600XT and FX 5700 Ultra. These two are always neck to neck in benchmarks, so your decision will be based on personal preference and price. Usually the price difference between FX 5700 Ultra and 5900XT is small. In that case go for the 5900XT, as it has much bigger potential than both 5700 Ultra and 9600XT.

The short-lived age of FX 5600 and 5600 Ultra is over, choose 5700 series over them, unless you find an incredible bargain for a 5600 Ultra.

If a DirectX 8 card will satisfy your gaming needs, try to find a GeForce 4 Ti4200, Ti4800SE or 4800. GeForce 4 series are one of the biggest successes of NVIDIA, and all are still very good performers. ATI's newish Radeon 9200 is not able to keep up with that old boys, and we must say we miss good old Radeon 8500. Why ATI decided to kill 8500/9100 and promote 9000/9200, we can not understand. Yes, 9200 is cool running and cheap to produce, but it can not run head to head with Ti4200, as 8500 could almost do.

If you are not an avid gamer and think integrated graphics are good enough, choose Radeon 9100IGP chipset over i865G containing Intel's ancient graphics core. On the other hand, Radeon 9100IGP boards are still having some teething problems, so if you prefer stability over graphics performance, wait for more mature 9100IGP boards, or go Intel.

Well, that is it. We hope you enjoyed your first meeting with DarkHardware. Please forgive what grammatical errors we might have done, as English is not our native language, and drop in time to time to check our new stuff....