Test Setup

Our test system consists of a P4 system which is handicapped due to its CPU being a 2.0 “A”, this one is limited to 400Mhz Quad Bus memory speed, and even when overclocked to 3Ghz it still is being bottlenecked by this, although performance comes close to an out-of-the-box P4 3Ghz “C” (800Mhz).

JMke's Setup
CPU	Intel P4 2ghz "A" @ 3 Ghz
Mainboard	Asus P4C800
Cooling	* Zalman CNPS-7000Cu
Memory	2 * Corsair PC3200 Pro 512Mb
Video	* Chaintech nVidia Geforce FX 5900XT * PNY nVidia Geforce 4 Ti4600

When the GF4 Ti4600 was launched it was the top performer, for a short period, until the Radeon 9700 Pro appeared on the scene. Nevertheless, today, it can still offer the enthusiast an enjoyable gaming experience.

“Low” end FX 5900 series vs “High” end GF4 series

Windows XP SP1 and the latest nVidia drivers (56.72) from the official website were installed on the tests system. The video card’s driver settings allows you to change Full Scene Antialiasing (FSAA), Anisotropic Filtering (AF) and overall mipmap quality settings. The slider gives you a choice between: Quality, Performance and High performance.

I disabled FSAA & AF and loaded up a game of MotoGP2 (1280x1024 @ max detail) to see how much visual and performance difference it would be when choosing the different image quality settings.

Average FPS recorded using FRAPS 2.0 during a replay of a spin around the “Le Mans” track gave the following results:

Quality: 43.38fps
Performance: 47.07fps
High Performance: 48.89fps

Well by moving a slider you can get up to 5 FPS extra, how much difference is there visually?

Quality	Performance	High Performance

The difference between Performance and Quality lies in very small details, High Performance versus the other shows a bit more difference, but all in all nothing earth shattering and certainly not what you could call “high image quality degradation”

All the benchmarks were run with the “Image Quality” slider set to Performance as it offers a very good balance between speed and visually stunning graphics.

On with the show ->