The real world section !

Not everyone relys on synthetic benchmarks so im going to include the wonderful "Need for Speed Underground" in our review. This game was very recently released and is without a doubt one of the most impressive DX9 games currently available. It has also been exceptionally well coded so it will run. (abeit at a lower resolution or detail setting), very well on most modern systems.

The images at the bottom of this page are taken from the game running on the 9800 XT at 1280x1024 4aa x 16 aniso with the Catalyst 3.9 driver set, if you click on the images you get a larger Jpeg image, but for those of you on broadband ive made available lossless compression BMPs. They are in a RAR archive around 20 megabytes and you can download it here

I used FRAPS 2.0.0 build 177 to record in game performance.

Playing several levels within the game at 1280x1024 with ALL in game candy turned on these are the frame rates FRAPS recorded. its clear that the 9800 XT is capable of handling this very impressive and system draining game. Fraps constantly records the FPS, dips and peaks, giving a final "average" result for the time allocated..

2003-11-28 13:47:59 - Speed
Frames: 269 - Time: 36344ms - Avg: 42.402 - Min: 42 - Max: 44

2003-11-28 13:48:53 - Speed
Frames: 2364 - Time: 15828ms - Avg: 40.879 - Min: 28 - Max: 51

2003-11-28 13:50:30 - Speed
Frames: 48 - Time: 21125ms - Avg: 42.666 - Min: 43 - Max: 43

The images below for reasons of clarity do not have light trails or motion blur turned on, while these are very effective options while playing for the purposes of still analysis they are not beneficial.

Fraps (paid for) also has the option to record video at 1024x768 and I thought it would be an interesting addition for those of you who have yet to see the game. As is documented in the FRAPS readme, enabling live video streaming to the hard drive while playing has a serious hit on system performance, but the 9800 XT was still capable of playing the game at 1024x768 with all eye candy on topped by 4AA and 16 aniso and sustaining over 25fps solid all the way through recording. For the purposes of the video and the massive original size (over 1 gig) I have limited the video footage to 25 fps and have passed it through 3ivx D4 4.0.4 (no audio) reducing the file size to just over 35 megs at 1500 bit rate. You arent going to pick out all the texture detail with compressed video but it will give you some idea of how pretty the game is in action.

The codec for playback is widely available on the net or you can pick it up as part of the kazaa lite codec package. Those on dial up will of course want to miss this download ;)

You can get the 35 meg video footage here

 

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