Windows Benchmarks

Since I'm using Windows Vista 64-bit Business Edition, I'm expecting to see slightly lower numbers that what many of our affiliates and related sites post for similar hardware. There are few games, drivers, and operating systems fully optimized for 64-bit computing, and thusly we see many performance hits. However, as 64-bit becomes more and more mainstream, our results here will prove to be much more realistic to newer PCs shipping with 64-bit operating systems.

Our benchmarks for this system will consist of Futuremark's 3dMark06 and the new 3dMark Vantage, Unreal Tournament 2004, Unreal Tournament 3, and Quake 4, and Half-Life 2. Unreal Tournament 2004 and Quake 4 both have native Linux ports, allowing me to directly compare performance between the two operating systems.

AMD released a hotfix to their driver shortly after 3dMark Vantage was released, as there were some cases of image corruption in the first graphics test. The hotfix also includes a few performance increases, as some of the code was meant for the Catalyst 8.5 driver.

Futuremark 3dMark06

Futuremark has yet to released a 64-bit edition of any gaming benchmarks, so I was expecting to see low numbers using this setup in a 64-bit environment. 3dMark06 was run with default settings with all tests selected.

I was somewhat dumbfounded to see the HD3870 Toxic score nearly 1000 points higher than the 8800GTX. Similarly, I found it strange that the CPU score suffered during the transition from the HD3870 Toxic to the GeForce 8800GTX.

Unreal Tournament 2004

Unreal Tournament 2004 was the oldest game we used to benchmark this system. The game may be a little older, but is still one of the most popular first person shooters, even after the release of it's successor. Additionally, UT2004 is one of the first games to have a native 64-bit port. We ran a simple bot match with all the settings on high. To run the botmatch and record our desired results, we used to following command line options: ut2004 dm-rankin?spectatoronly=1?numbots=12?quickstart=1?attractcam=1 -benchmark -seconds=77 -ini=default.ini

As the graph shows, the HD3870 Toxic comes out on top in both max FPS and average FPS. Neither card at any given point spiked below 40FPS, meaning the game is fairly smooth regardless of which card is used.