Games Benchmarks - OpenGL

Return to Castle Wolfenstein (RtCW)

RtCW is an OpenGL title based on the Quake3 engine.

The performance of the Xabre 400 under RtCW seems to be fairly good, with the average FPS in the 90's at 1024x768 and, although shy of 60 FPS, at 1600x1200 well above 30 FPS. The fill-rate graph shows the type of pattern that we'd expect for this title on a budget board, with it being CPU limited at in the bottom three resolutions and more fill-rate bound un the upper two.

One thing that was noticable in this title was that there was colour banding evident in the rendering, reminiscent of 16-bit despite 32-bit textures and rendering selected. Its also interesting to note that 640x480 is lower performing than 800x600.

As usual the 3X FSAA is showing quite a performance hit. Although 1600x1200 was available with 3X FSAA there was some rendering errors. Judging by the performance drop at 1600x1200 it would lead you to think that something like the textures are being pushed into AGP memory, however at 128MB this shouldn't really be the case.

The performance over the two CPU's highlights the dependency on the CPU for this title, with the 1.8GHz P4 never moving above 71 FPS. At the higher resolutions the two systems do converge as rendering performance is more fill-rate limited.

Unlike some of the DirectX titles, here we can see that the AGP8X bus is providing a better performance in all cases, albeit very slight.