Code Creatures is a synthetic 3D benchmark that provides us with yet another angle for our Direct 3D video performance comparisons. This is certainly a high-end 3D benchmark that really pushes the video hardware to its limits, and also requires DirectX 8 hardware.
The WinFast A300 Ultra MyViVo is able to significantly outperform the Radeon 9700 Pro in this test. The GeForce FX's significantly higher core clock speed and higher fill rate shows its benefits in this test.
MadOnion's 3DMark 2001SE Pro is a popular 3D benchmark tool, and one that many gamers use to compare performance results. All benchmark testing was performed in 32-bit mode, and used Pure Hardware DirectX support.
Here we see the Leadtek GeForce FX fall slightly behind the Radeon 9700 Pro. As usual, both cards are well ahead of the GeForce4 card.
While there has been some controversy surrounding 3DMark 2003, and while we're still on the fence as to whether or not we should use this as our main Direct 3D benchmark, we feel that it's worth including, and does a good job of gauging a card's DirectX 9.0 capabilities. We ran this benchmark using the default 1024x768 resolution with the default set of tests.
Driver "optimizing" aside, the GeForce FX comes out ahead of the Radeon 9700 Pro in our 3DMark 2003 tests. The GeForce4 remains in dust of the other cards with less than half the score.
One of the best ways of stressing a high-end video card is through a round of Anti-aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering testing. Unreal Tournament 2003 has proven to be an excellent gauge for AA and AF, so it's only natural that we see what the WinFast A300 Ultra MyViVo card can do.
Benchmark tests were run at 8X Anisotropic Filtering (Quality mode for ATI), 4X Anti-aliasing, and then combining these into a killer 4X AA and 8X AF setting. We reported our results using the Flyby part of the UT 2003 benchmark using a resolution of 1280x960x32.
With 4X FSAA turned, on the Radeon 9700 Pro pulled ahead of the Leadtek GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, thanks to ATI's use of the wider 256-bit memory bus. Once again, the GeForce4 is completely destroyed by both cards.
The Leadtek WinFast A300 Ultra MyViVo faired a little better in the Anisotropic Filtering test, and ATI's trilinear 8X Quality mode is slower than the GeForce FX's implementation by just a hair.
Finally, when both 8X Anisotropic filtering and 4X FSAA are enabled, NVIDIA's 128-bit memory bus finally cuts into the GeForce FX's potential. ATI's superior memory bandwidth allows the Radeon 9700 Pro to outperform the GeForce FX by a significant margin of about 12fps.
