Our first attempt at running
Dark Messiah was with all the details set to max
(even textures). Regrettably we were forced to
lower the environment texture levels to high,
as otherwise the framerate oscillated around 2
frames per second. We were also forced to turn
of AA if we wanted to avoid the same issue. After
that was done though, the board performed admirably.
The experience was a smooth, stutter free gore-fest
both at 1600x1200 and at 1920x1200.
Being intrigued by the
weird stuttering when AA or very high textures
were enabled we decided to do the same test on
a PCI-E X1950Pro. In this scenario we had no issues
whatsoever, so can can see that apparently the
AGP bus is having problems transferring so much
data (which the card is unable to keep cached
due to only 256Mb of memory).
