Game Engine Benchmarks
Game engine benchmarks are extremely important to the evaluation of the performance of a video card. It provides a consistent measuring stick and lets us know which cards work well for which games. This allows us to select the right tool for the right job. Obviously we’ll pick the card that performs best for the games or genres of games that we play the most. We’ll be concentrating on playable frame rates on each of the tests and we’ve used games that have built in benchmarks so that you can play along at home to make sure that you are getting the right card for you.
Street Fighter IV (DX9)
We start our game benchmarks with DirectX 9 and this timeless classic gets played at LAN parties all the time. Based on DX9 we can see that this game plays well for all of the GPUs at the highest possible settings, both with AA and AA off. We do take a pretty major hit in performance for turning it on though especially with the HD 5770’s frame rate.
Batman Arkham Asylum Game of the Year Edition (DX9)
It’s hard to believe this is a DirectX 9 game but it really is. It’s also one of three titles that supports PhysX that we’ll be testing out today. The lack of hardware PhysX support on the AMD/ATI GPUs give nVidia a decisive victory. All of the nVidia cards have frame rates well above the magical 30 FPS while neither of the AMD/ATI cards could handle it. Turning PhysX off would do this game a serious injustice so it’s all or nothing.
Mafia II (DX9)
While it isn’t the most imaginative game in the world, Mafia II is a lot of fun. It’s such a beautiful game to look at with PhysX at least set to medium. Unfortunately, we run into the same problem with the AMD/ATI cards with unplayabilty as we run PhysX in software. Without it frame rates perk up a whole lot, but this game isn’t nearly as cool without it on. It’s a real shame that nVidia won’t turn on PhysX on a secondary GPU with the AMD/ATI card as a primary adapter in the drivers and support it.
Final Fantasy XIV (DX9)
Our last DirextX 9 game benchmark is harder to decipher because we simply get a score at the end. However, the benchmark does have a chart at the bottom left hand corner that looks like a heartbeat, which I assume is the frame rate. Based on me sitting there for each card’s benchmark run, I could see visually just how well each card really did and how smooth the frame rate was. Overall, the “squiggly line” was smoother with either of the AMD/ATI cards. It’s kind of funny seeing as how this is an nVidia sponsored benchmark. With a release date of September 30th, 2010, there’s no time left to optimize drivers.
Between HD 5770 and GTS 450, you should be investing in the HD 5770 if you want to spend time on this game. Since it is MMORPG, you might as well pick the one that does best in this game as you’ll probably be stuck playing for quite some time.
Let’s move along with the DirectX 10 and 11 benchmarks shall we?