Super7 Video Accelerator Comparison - Part 1: High End Gaming Solutions (June 99)

For months now, there hasn't been a decent Direct3D game that could measure performance accurately.  Shogo is probably one of the worst benchmarks ever used on AnandTech as a Direct3D benchmark, however it was the best/only option for quite some time.  At the same time, Incoming/Forsaken were quickly growing to be beyond highly outdated benchmarks, luckily Rage Software, the makers of Incoming, included a nice benchmark in their latest release, Expendable (which is a pretty cool game actually).   Unfortunately Expendable is very CPU dependent and isn't the best way of comparing one card to another, nevertheless it is the best thing to benchmark Direct3D with currently, so we'll have to use it.  The game to keep an eye out for is Unreal Tournament, if Epic includes a decent benchmark in UT, you can expect that to become the next Direct3D game used for benchmarking. 

To run the Expendable benchmark, simply run the go.exe file with the '-timedemo' extension, i.e. C:\Expendable\go.exe -timedemo.  All Expendable benchmarks were performed with bumpmapping turned off, and texture detail set to high.   The performance illustrated by the Expendable demo did not vary greatly between 16-bit and 32-bit color, making the results redundant, and therefore only 16-bit color tests were shown.  At the same time, the performance drop vs resolution increase was negligible, making 1024 x 768 - 16 bit color the only performance represented.

For Direct3D performance, Expendable provides a decent benchmark when comparing among processors, however for video card comparisons Expendable isn't the best benchmark to use to compare cards.  Direct3D performance is a little different than OpenGL performance since there is no ICD tweaking necessary to have good performance, simple driver tweaking and raw power contributes to a card's Direct3D performance.   The leaders in this area are the G400MAX and the TNT2 as indicated, albeit poorly, by the Expendable benchmark.  Expendable is much like crusher.dm2 in terms of a benchmark, the minimal differences between the four cards compared here translate into noticeable although not prominent performance differences in real world gaming scenarios.