Overclocking

Out of the box the Chaintech could be clocked up to 450/750 (core/mem) without breaking a sweat. By adding extra cooling and exchanging thermal paste between Cooler and GPU even higher could be achieved



The added cooling power put the maximum stable core speed between 460-470Mhz, an extra 80mm fan blowing over the RAM heatsinks made them run stable at 800Mhz, quite a performer this Chaintech card.

For some of the tests below I set the cards to their “out-of-the-box” OC speed of 450/750, while the PNY was clocked from 300/660 to 330/720 to see if the statement “overclocking your video card can postpone the need for an upgrade” is true.



It seems the 5900XT core offers quite a bit of headroom, while the memory is lagging behind the older Ti4600’s OC capability.


UT2003 / UT2004

First up is a popular Direct3D game from Epic, their latest creation uses an enhanced version of the UT2003 engine, aptly named “UT2004”. The Botmatch benchmark stresses the system more then it does the video card, this gives results which are close to each other, depending on the map.



At a resolution of 1024x768 the difference between the 2 cards is negligible except for the DM Map, increasing the resolution to 1280x1024 makes it clear that the 5900XT is the superior card, almost maintaining the same frame rate as it did with at a lower resolution.

The UT2003 benchmark includes a flyby mode which really pushes each video card to its limits



Both cards are able to offer fluent gameplay but the 5900XT sticks out when a higher resolution is used.


Chameleon Mark

This is a pretty old benchmark, but it can quickly show you the performance of the older generation of shaders:



ChameleonMark is a performance tool for measuring pixel shader performance for a variety of shaders. It is based upon the popular "Chameleon" demo released by NVIDIA with the introduction of the GeForce3 line of GPUs.



Seeing as this is a BenchMark which could be used with GF3 generation of cards it comes to no surprise that both cards can play it fluently at 60+fps @ 1024x768. The 5900XT outperforms the GF4.. and not just “a bit”. 100+% at 1024x768 and even more at the higher resolutions!

Quake III Arena

An old classic, the Q3A engine is used in a lot of popular games now, although these engines are heavily modified to allow for greater detail. If these cards can run Q3A at ridiculously high frame rates then they stand a fair chance of running the other Q3A based games quite decently.

Check! The 3Ghz system is holding back both cards from performing at their optimal speeds it seems :)


3DMark2001 Se & 3DMark03

When 3DMark2001 was fairly new companies used it to base their games playability on it, a PC which scored 2500 3Dmarks could run Max Payne fluently at higher detail. Today this benchmark offers the end-users a quick check to see if their system can handle DirectX 8 games without problem.



Although more system-stressing DirectX 8 games have hit the market since Max Payne, it seems both cards will give you a good shot at running the latest DX8 games at full or slightly reduced detail when keeping the resolution at 1024x768.

The newer brother, 3DMark03, set out with the same goals as the 2001 version, unfortunately it has been used and abused that it no longer offers comparable results when used with cards from different manufactures (ATI/nVidia). But it does still shine a good light on the capabilities of a video card when used with a game which supports or even requires DX9 features to run.



As the GF4 is lacking in Pixel Shader 2.0 support, we see a rather large gap between the 2 cards.

Far Cry

A next gen game which can be used as an example is the extremely good looking Far Cry



While the 5900XT can give you fluent gameplay at “High” Quality settings, you will have to reduce details to get the same performance from the Ti4600.

Speaking of details, how do these cards perform when we start moving the FSAA and AF sliders around? Find out on the next page ->