At long last, we’ve found another game suitable to add to the Sharky Extreme benchmarking suite. MDK is unique among benchmarking tools we’ve used before in that T&L is an option that can be enabled or disabled. On top of its usefulness as a benchmark, MDK is a blast to play!

For our testing purposes, texture quality is set to maximum; color depth is always 32-bit, trilinear filtering is enabled and mipmaps are turned on. The variable in this situation will be T&L and how effective it is at both low and high resolutions. It should also be noted that enabling T&L also increases the lighting complexity of the game.

It is apparent that the raw processing power of the GeForce2 GTS allows it to tear through our low resolution testing, where its four pixel pipelines definitively dominate. The story changes at 1024x768 and above, however, where greater memory bandwidth and three texture units allow the Radeon to maneuver its way past the GeForce2. Even at 1600x1200, the Radeon manages to deliver very playable frame rates on all of these high-end platforms.