Date: |
September 8th, 2003 |
Price: |
$143-145 |
Sponsors: |
|
Author: |
|
Editor: |
|
Score: |
8/10 |
Albatron GeForce FX 5200 Ultra & 5600P Video Cards Benchmarks
Now that you know what to expect
when you open that nice, shiny box; how do the cards perform? Read on to find
out if the GeForce
FX 5200 Ultra or 5600 Turbo are right for your next upgrade.
Quake III
To start off, I used a Quake III benchmark.
Older but still important to more old school gamers and to test its brute force
as
Quake III is known for its massive frame rates. Testing each card using 32
bit, full screen, light map lighting, high detail, high
texture,
and
high
text
filter,
making sure to test its full capabilities.
As this graph shows, the Albatron GeForce FX
5600P Turbo holds up well against the older NVIDIA card, GeForce 4 TI 4400.
Although not faster than the GeForce 4, both the 5600 and the 5200 stay above
140 FPS in a 1280x1024 mode. If you’re looking for more performance in
older games, your current video card may be sufficient if you are running a
recent GeForce Card (such as a GeForce 3/4 and some high end GeForce 2's).
3D Mark 2001 SE Build 330
3D Mark 2001 is another popular benchmark, using
these two cards; we benchmarked using 32 bit colors and standard settings.
3D Mark 2001 is another older benchmark that will help compare these cards
for older
and also newer games. We chose not to use 3D Mark 2003 due to the extensive
amount of political baggage the benchmark tends to carry. We also do not hold
highly
these benchmarks as optimizations made in drivers for this program will never
help in-game performance.
According to the graph, the two FX cards did
mediocre in this benchmark, seeing as the low resolutions (640x480) scored
as high as 12,752 marks with the 5600. The 5200 trailed closely behind with
12,360. Most people I know don’t like using such low resolutions. Cranking
the res. up a bit to (1152x864) we see the 5600’s marks dropping to 9,361
and the 5200’s to 8,730 showing that the 2 FX cards do not like to handle
such high resolutions like any other video card.
Unreal Tournament 2003 (using [H]ardOCP’s v2.1 Script)
The Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmark is one
of my favorites, nonetheless, showing the weaker side of the GeForce FX cards.
UT2003
is one of the best real-life gaming benchmarks we have available with its high
detail, and complex graphics engine.
Unlike the older benchmarks, the FX cards showed there true “potential” while
using High quality, Direct3D, and Flyby of the map DM-Antalus. For our statistics
we used only the “Average FPS”. As you can see in the graph, Unreal
Tournament 2003 drained the 5200 from everything it had during 1280x1024. Pulling
only 51.3 FPS the 5600 did only 66.39 FPS
which is not much better. Most people that have played Unreal Tournament 2003
know that it needs to have high resolution; at all times, to well get the whole
effect. However anything over 30 or so Frames Per Second the human eye will
not notice, thus the card performs quite adequately but there will probably
be some rough spots where the card just will slow below the 30 FPS.
Gun Metal: Benchmarks 1 & 2
The Gun Metal Benchmark was the FX’s worst
nightmare. The results
are extremely different compared to the last few benchmarks. The main reason
for this, Gun Metal is a newer Direct X9 benchmark, something the GeForce FX
series isn’t entirely good at. Surely NVIDIA added hardware Direct X9
support, but still, the GeForce FX has some trouble at higher resolutions.
These two benchmarks were pretty similar, the
second not as powerful as the first. The difference between the resolutions
in the first one only varied from 13.77 in 640x480 to 9.37 in 1280x1024 using
the 5600, with the 5200 only about 2 FPS behind across the board.
|
