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In the Forums... |
Posted: July 8th, 2001 Written by: Tuan "GTk2" Huynh Benchmarks (cont.) Quake 3 Arena 
 In Quake 3 Arena with the Fastest setting, we find that the MX400 is more than twice as fast as the Radeon VE. Without the T&L Engine and extra rendering pipeline, the VE’s 3D Performance suffers dramatically. With the Normal setting, memory bandwidth really matters, so we see the Radeon VE slowly catching up to the MX400. At 1280x1024 we see the Radeon VE being limited by the core while the MX400 is being limited by its memory bandwidth. With the High Quality setting we don’t see much drop from the Normal setting. It seems that no matter how high the quality Quake 3 Arena, the performance drop for the Radeon is negligible. The small difference in performance is most likely due to the crippled Radeon core and not the memory bandwidth. Serious Sam  Serious Sam is game that stresses the card’s 3D engine. It features a unique 3D engine called the “Serious Engine” that optimizes itself for the Video Card that’s installed. Here we see the same trend as in Quake 3 Arena. The performance drop from Speed, Normal, and High are negligible. Overclocking  Just like every other ATI Radeon, the core and memory hit 200MHz easily. The memory would not go any further than 200MHz but I was able to squeeze an extra 10MHz from the core, ending up with 210/200MHz. After a little trial and error with Powerstrip 3 as well as multiple restarts, I finally was able to get the VE overclocked and run Quake 3 Demo127. Overclocking the card doesn’t really have an impact on performance much since memory bandwidth isn’t a bottleneck for the VE -- a 3fps difference in Quake 3 at the Highest setting. I suggest not overclocking the card and just leaving it at the stock speed of 183/183MHz since the performance increase is negligible. Also, because the Radeon VE is targeted at the IT professional rather than gamer, overclocking isn’t an important factor in the overall score of the card. |
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