Still the most advanced OpenGL game, Doom 3 pushes the capabilities of current video cards to the limits. Frame rates were kept locked at 60 FPS as both cards did not exceed this limit. Settings used were: High Quality Special Effects On, Enable Shadows On, Enable Specular On, Enable Bump Map On, and Vertical Sync Off. Resolutions of 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768 were tested along with AA/AF as identified in the results table.
Both cards take a severe hit in Doom 3 with antialiasing applied. What's interesting is at default clocks only a 6-7% hit is taken when 8xAF is applied while a 30% is taken with the TC6200Q when overclocked. Applying 2XAA to the mix and the hit balloons to 38-41% at default clocks and up to 53% when overclocked on the same card. Still, overclocking is the way to go in Doom3 with the Albatron TC6200Q even though Doom 3 is very forgiving and plays well and looks good, even at default clocks with appropriate resolution. Doom 3 is a little too much for the TC6200 16/128MB card to handle and struggled during actual game play.
HALF LIFE 2
One of the most popular games of 2004, HL2 stresses all cards. I did a significant amount of testing using a number of different benchmarks. I tried several ForceWare drivers such as 71.20, 71.24, and 71.84. Performance was about the same with each driver. However, I did experience the 'green water' with the 71.24's that was not present with the 71.20 and 71.84 drivers.
All recorded results in the following table were attained with the ForceWare 71.84 drivers. The benchmark I ended up using in this review was the demo from HardwareOC titled, 'Coast.' This benchmark's results most closely reflected the average frame rate numbers I experienced in actual game play using FRAPS. I did extend the testing in this benchmark by adding the resolution of 1280x1024 to the set. In the NO AA/AF tests trilinear filtering was used and all in-game settings at quality.
I played HL2 all the way through at 800x600 with no AA/AF on the
TC6200 engineering sample and experienced no problems in the game such as
slowdowns or stuttering. In fact, game play was good and FRAPS revealed that an
average of 35 FPS was maintained. No, visually it was not equal to my
experiences with the 6800GT at 1600x1200 on a ViewSonic P225f with high 4xAA and
8xAF settings. However, it was close to the Gigabyte PC6600, with 128MB on-board
memory, except for the differences between 800x600 and 1024x768 resolutions. The
short-coming for the TC6200 is not being able to use antialiasing and
insufficient memory for play at higher resolutions.
The Albatron upped the ante with game play experiences even closer to the PC6600
with the TC6200Q providing the use of 1024x768 resolution with all quality
settings enabled. Also notable was the 20 FPS advantage at 800x600 at either
default and overclocked timings over the TC6200.
In testing with the benchmark demo, HardwareOC-Coast, the scores show about what
you can expect in this game. It should be noted that both cards provided
excellent stability in game play.
