Fudo "R520" kicks Nvidia's butt in Quake 4

FOR THE PAST three years ATI was constantly losing to Nvidia in OpenGL games. Nvidia was usually faster in Quake 3 and we don't even have to mention that Nvidia loved Doom 3 as it had two generations of cards made for that game. Let me refresh your memory, mighty John Carmack asked Nvidia to make him a chip that can render pixel information's without Z values and Nvidia obeyed knowing that this chap will sell many of its engines. If I remember correctly he sold more than a dozen engines already and one of the hot games that is using this engine is best selling game in Austrian gaming shops. Its of course Quake 4 done by Raven software for id software who published it with Activision. Kinds of gets complicated.

Well to get back on GPU side NV40, Geforce 6800 generation of the card has sixteen pipelines that can render sixteen pipelines with Z value but the same card can render twenty four pixels with Z value which can be very well used in Doom 3 and all the games based on Doom 3 engine. G70 generation of cards has twenty four pipelines but in Doom 3 can render thirty two pixels without Z value per clock. Doom 3 engine need those kinds of pixels as it will calculate Z in the second pass and get the desired effect, that's how the master mind designed it. Nvidia did provide this to Carmack and all Nvidia cards from NV30 / NV35 generation can render pixels without Z passes.

On the other side R420, R480 and newcomer R520 all has sixteen pipelines only and can not render any pixels without Z. In ATI case we are always talking about sixteen pixels only, not a single more. If you think about it if you are rendering scene with lot of flat Z passes in best case scenario G70 cards are rendering 32 pixels while ATI is doing only 16. You would expect that Nvidia is kicking ATI's butt in every single scenario and this was the case until ATI released its new driver. With new alpha driver tables are turning drastically.

ATI was playing with R520 since April, as that was the time it got some working quantities of R520 clocked at 490 MHz and sent some to the developers but its wondrous driver team never manage to match Nvidia's OpenGL performance. Nvidia was just faster. Then a few days ago a engineer inside ATI USA we believe found the way to optimise memory controller and out of the bloom Radeon X1000 generation gained up to 30 percent of performance increase. For all of you who think that ATI is cheating we are investigating on it and Nvidia has Radeon X1800XL cards and the drivers so if there is any hacks in this driver we will let you know, we could not see any visual quality corruption.

The new driver is still Alpha but it's downloadable from ATI's rather complicated support site. To save you some time looking for it you can download it here. This tweak will be available in 5.11 WHQL drivers that are expected before end middle of November.

We were running each test for the four times but we notice that second, third and fourth run are almost identical so we decided to take the second score and put it into the charts. As for Quake 4 as a game, we can say it has something of an old Quake 2 spirit and this game tricked me into 3Dgraphic world so its very special to me. Graphic looks astonishing especially with FSAA 4X or even 6X in ATI case and 8 X or even 16 X anisotropic that we tried. Game play is good, story line is good, refreshed and it's a good buy if you want to play a good first person shooter game. I can highly recommend this game, but I have to warn you that Doom 3 engine will add some glossy effect on the humans that I kind of dislike but all the rest look great. As a matter a fact it's all about game play and they got that one right.

Benchmarketing:
We used :

Dual core Athlon 64 4800+ clocked at 2400 MHz
Abit Fatal1ty Nforce 4 SLI motherboard
2x512MB Corsair CMX512 3200 XL memory
Western Digital 8MB 160GB SATA drive
Stock Athlon 64 cooler
OCZ Power Stream 600W PSU

We were testing Quake 4 only and we used Geforce 7800 GTX 256 MB card and compared it with Radeon X1800XT 512 MB card clocked at 625 MHz core and 1500 MHz memory. We tested original non WHQL driver that we got with ATI card, we used wonder Open GL one named "hotfix_xp-2k_dd_ccc_027483a.exe" and in Nvidia case we used latest greatest WHQL 81.85 driver.

We made a test that we symbolically called "f". We recorded our own demo in the Quake 4 console that you activate with CTRL - ALT - tilde key, and later we activated the same test with simple "timedemo f" command. It's an actual scene from the game where we have some shoot out, a few enemies and quite a lot of fire power. We tested Quake 4 in both Ultra high quality that requires at least 500 MHz memory for textures and we tested in standard high quality, all effects on of course.

Quake 4 High Quality	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
Radeon X1800XT old driver	108.0	101.0	90.7
Radeon X1800XT memory controler fix driver	133.6	117.5	114.0
Geforce 7800 GTX default clock	151.8	140.5	122.9
Quake 4 High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
Radeon X1800XT old driver	102.2	84.7	66.7
Radeon X1800XT memory controler fix driver	126.6	116.6	98.8
Geforce 7800 GTX default clock	138.8	115.1	89.6
Quake 4 Ultra High Quality	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
Radeon X1800XT old driver	108.0	101.0	87.3
Radeon X1800XT memory controler fix driver	131.7	124.0	107.9
Geforce 7800 GTX default clock	137.2	129.2	111.1
Quake 4 Ultra High Quality FSAA 4X + Aniso 8X	1024x768	1280x1024	1600x1200
Radeon X1800XT old driver	98.9	81.5	63.5
Radeon X1800XT memory controler fix driver	125.5	110.6	90.6
Geforce 7800 GTX default clock	125.3	97.6	75.7

You can see that as long as you turn FSAA and Anisotropic filtering off that Nvidia is still leading in Quake 4 High quality settings. You can clearly see that ATI gained significantly with new driver as at heavy load at 1600x1200 it managed to gain additional 24 FPS. Following this performance trend curve we believe that at 2048x1536 scores would be much more competitive and ATI would either match Nvidia or it would be very close. Well the situation changes drastically when you turn FSAA 4X and use Anisotropic filtering 8X. Nvidia is still faster at 10x7 but losing by one frame in 12x10. ATI takes drastic lead when it comes to 1600x1200 with this features off where it runs almost 10 frames faster than Nvidia's offering. The trick is Nvidia said to use back at GTX launch that we should be testing those cards with FSAA 4X and 8X at higher resolutions as this is the way that gamers that buys them are going to play, should we say this is their way to meant to be played.

When you turn Ultra high quality Nvidia card is still faster by just a few frames than ATI but ATI card is getting very competitive with new drivers. ATI managed to increase its performance by averagely 25 FSP, a lot we would say. It's again FSAA 4X and Anisotropic filtering 8X that will show the big difference. ATI is just 0.2 FPS faster in 10x7 but at 12x10 you can see 13 FPS lead while at 16x12 ATI is leading by 15 Frames per second. You can clearly see what is the fastest option to play the Quake 4, the way it meant to be played but sarcastically enough its ATI card that gains the best scores at highest resolutions.

Conclusion:
ATI driver team did a greet job, we will keep our eyes opened for some kind of cheating and non allowed optimizations but so far we can tell that driver is fine, cheating free, picture quality is good. Surprise, surprise Radeon X1800XT becomes the world fastest Quake 4 Open GL card and not even the most optimistic ATI lovers could expect such a turn. For the first time in the last three years Nvidia is losing its performance crown in OpenGL and oddly enough Doom 3 and Quake 4 are the only two games where you can see dramatic performance increase in ATI Radeon X1800XT compared with its Geforce 7800 GTX parts. New Open GL king is here, so hail to ATI X1800 XT for this one, and from this perspective it looks like FireGL R520 might give Nvidia's Quadro much more trouble that any of use believed as for a chance ATI can run OpenGL really fast. Just for the record you can buy Geforce 7800 GTX now while you have to wait for Radeon X1800XT for at least three more weeks, but Radeon X1800XL that can make Geforce 7800 GT run for its money, especially in Quake 4 is already in the stores. µ