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D3D Shooters

Since the release of DX9 hardware, it seems that for the most part, D3D has taken the lead in the 3D API wars with more AAA titles that use D3D as its primary rendering mode especially those that are Shader-intensive. For the most part, OpenGL shooters are still based off of the venerable Quake 3 engine and until DOOM 3 finally rears its head, OpenGL games look to be taking a back seat technologically to the latest D3D games.

UT2k4

UT2k4 is one of the AAA titles that have been released in recent months. UT2k4 is not particularly shader intensive but has vast open areas and a lot of textures. With AA/AF, the X800 series do not even break a sweat and are both CPU bound all the way up to 1600. The 9800XT pulls up great numbers at 1024 also but it drops off at 1280 and above. Even with 4x AA and 8x AF at 1024, both X800 based cards are STILL CPU bound. At 1280 we start to see drops with both X800s. The 9800XT drops off fairly linearly but at 1600, the X800XT doubles the number of frames as we are seeing with the 9800XT. The 9600XT should not be counted out either- it does surprisingly well at 1024 with AA/AF.

Halo

One of the biggest hits on the Xbox is Halo and its transition to the PC world has been a bit rocky at times requiring a beast of a machine to crank out good framerates. With more immature drivers we saw a fairly significant difference between the Pixel Shader 2.0 and 1.4 paths but that gap has closed significantly for both Nvidia and ATi during the last few driver releases.

Jebus save me. The X800 XT doubles up the 9800XT at 1600. Since Halo is fairly shader heavy we see the effects of the extra pipes and extra clock speed the X800 XT has over the X800 Pro unlike the CPU bound case in UT2k4. The X800 XT is roughly 30% faster than the Pro at 1600.