A new benchmark I plan to use is the X-Isle technology demo which features Crytek Studios' CryENGINE 2 Outdoor Technology graphics engine. This demo makes use of bump-mapping with per pixel lighting and realtime cube environment mapping. The engine has full transform and lighting support with 24-bit truecolor lighting including dynamic ambient, directional, and point light sources. In other words, the graphics are impressive.

Clicking on any one of the above images will open a new window. Each image was magnified by three times and illustrates each level of FSAA offering better results.

The per-pixel shading effects in this demo provide an added touch of realism to a base texture. The detailed skin on the dinosaur is an example of the capabilities of NVIDIA's shading rasterizer. Click here to check out some serious eye candy!

Graphics for the benchmark runs were at maximum quality settings. Transform and lighting and texture compression were enabled. Default sound, with EAX disabled, was used.

X-Isle Demo Performance - 16-Bit Color

FSAA performance on the X-Isle demo definitely took its toll on all three GeForce2 cards. With a range of 40-60K polygons per scene delivering anywhere from 2-5 million polygons per second, it's understandable as to why performance is lackluster with FSAA enabled. There's a staggering amount of processing going on behind the scences. Especially at a 2x2 FSAA where all three cards experienced single digit frame rates during the cubemapping refraction scene.

The GeForce2 MX manages to get 47fps at 640x480 in 16-bit color. Performance didn't increase that much with the GeForce2 GTS and Ultra which is an indication that the cryENGINE2 requires some serious CPU power or can be further optimized for better performance. Interestingly the GeForce2 GTS actually performed better than the Ultra with FSAA enabled considering the Ultra had an 8fps advantage at 1280x1024 with FSAA disabled.

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