Midrange Graphics Card Round Up

Anti-Aliasing Scaling Performance

As this is the first time we are taking a look at the 9600GT we felt it was worth taking a look at how well it scales when using anti-aliasing particulary when compared to the 3800 series from ATI. For this test we have played through a level of Half-Life 2 on each card as well as taking part in a Quake Wars battle (Not the same level/battle used in our standard benchmarks on previous pages). The frame rates, as always, were recorded with FRAPS and the results are shown below for both 4x anti-aliasing and 8xanti-aliasing.

The objective here is not to get playable framerates, instead it is to show how much each card is impacted by the change in anti-aliasing level.

In this short test we see that there is no clear winner as far as anti-aliasing impact is concerned. The Radeon handles the Half-Life 2 engine better but the Geforce takes slightly less of a hit in Quake Wars. Also worthy of mention is the impact of 8xAA when looking at single and dual 9600s in Half-Life 2. We see here that the SLI system has far less of a performance drop (16% vs 25%)  where as in Quake Wars the reduction in framerates is roughly the same (18-20%).