GTX 480 vs. HD 5870, 8x AA Performance Analysis, Part 3
PT Boats: Knights of the Sea
PT Boats: Knights of the Sea is a stand-alone DX10 benchmark utility released by Akella. It is actually a tech demo of their upcoming simulation-action game. This DX10 benchmark test runs reliably and apparently provides very accurate and repeatable results.
We set the only settings options available to us as follows:
DirectX Version: DirectX 10
Resolution: 2560×1600, 1920×1600 and 1680×1050 at 60 Hz
Image Quality: High
Anti aliasing: 4x or 8x MSAA
Here are the results of the PT Boats DX10 benchmark, first at 2560×1600 resolution. Unfortunately our HD 5870 would not run this benchmark reliably with the 10-3a drivers and would often hang at the load screen. So we present the comparison of 4x versus 8x AA with the GTX 480, first at 2560×1600.
Now at 1920×1200:
Now at 1680×1050 resolution:
We see the 8xAA performance hit is pretty even across all the resolutions, increasing as it goes higher.
Please take into consideration that nVidia uses a different version of AntiAliasing starting 8x and up, therefore comparisons are henceforth limited at best. Sadly I don’t have a direct link right now, but please take it into consideration before drawing (final) conclusions.
We took special care to make sure that identical AA settings were applied in all of our benchmarks including for Crysis. We even noted that in the full retail game, Just Cause 2, that we observed the benchmark results showed the Radeon was running at 8xCSAA while the GeForce was 8xAA.
However, we have since learned from AMD that the benchmark results are wrongly identifying 8xMSAA as CSAA. The Radeon is actually running 8xMSAA and this minor issue will be addressed in a future patch.
Everything we test is “apples to apple” unless it is specified in the review.
Nice article man. Cheers
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