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BFG Technologies Asylum GeForce FX 5900 Ultra Review - Page 5 Of 8

MORROWIND

This is another game that needs little introduction. To add some continuity between our reviews here at nV News I decided to incorporate Mike's Morrowind Game Play Testing article techniques. I tried to mimic his tests exactly with one exception being that I left out the 1920x1440 resolution test. Another notable difference is that of our system configurations being considerably different (with mine being a slower system). I'll not echo Mike's comments but rather cut to the chase giving you just the results in the benchmark section below.

Gameplay Impressions

This game is another one that is supposedly heavily CPU dependent. I can believe it. It'll still bring even the latest/greatest machine to it's knees if you kick up all settings and AA/AF to highest settings. The best impression I can convey is that the game is immensely smoother and just has a much better feel to it than it did on my Ti4800SE. I like to play at 1024x768 with all of the eye-candy on and 4X AA / 8X AF.

Benchmarks


 
 

Above are are my results based on Mike's first game play benchmark. To more easily compare our two result sets check out the graph below. My results are overlaying Mike's results which are shown in grayscale. Note that the numeric values represent Mike's results.
 


 

                 (See paragraph above this graph)



 
 

The overlay thing was kind of a test so let me know if you like it. For the above graph you can compare to Mike's results via this link. Also, it's worth noting that AA does not work with the 44.03 Detonator drivers in Morrowind. This has been corrected the 44.61 version though.
 

 

 
 

This is an additional test that I decided to toss in. I've been curious as to what kind of performance difference there is between shadows at 50% and 100%.

As you can see above the answer is; not much. When compared to the previous graph at 1600x1200 you'll notice that there's basically no difference at all whether shadows are on or not.

Could this be evidence of the new NVIDIA UltraShadow Technology advantages? I don't know if Morrowind was written to take advantage of UltraShadow or not but the results are impressive regardless.

NOTE: One of our readers reproduced the same shadow results with an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro so UltraShadow isn't likely involved. I doubted that it was since MW was written quite a while before NV35 was finalized.

Bottom Line - Morrowind:  I'd never really gotten too involved into this game despite how much I'd anticipated it and been a fan of the previous Elder Scrolls games. The reason for this is that I never was really happy with performance that my previous video cards offered. With the Asylum 5900 Ultra, let's just say that I'm now very happy.

NEVERWINTER NIGHTS DEMO

This is one game that I didn't really get into all that much. I don't own the retail version and the timetable for this review just didn't allow me to really sink my teeth into what the demo offers. The graphics are nice and clean with the textures being a bit more crisp/detailed compared to Dungeon Siege.

Overall Graphics Quality Best
Environment Shadows On
Creature Shadow Detail Highest
Advanced Video Options All Highest/Checked
Vsync Off
Used 64MB or higher texture pack

Gameplay Impressions

I only played through the initial part of the demo. All resolutions and AA / AF settings were awesome except for when I pushed it to 1600x1200 8X AA / 8X AF but not too shabby at 1280x1024 with 8X AA / 8X AF.

Benchmarks

The results really tend to jump around here so I'm not too sold on the accuracy of these results. I find benchmarking this kind of games kind of difficult with many intangibles and the flow of games like this is so different than the typical first person shooter.

Bottom Line - Neverwinter Nights:  It looked great and played well. Admittedly, I really didn't do too much with this one, but what little I did experience was nice.

IL2-STURMOVIK DEMO (not Forgotten Battles)

This game has some amazing eye-candy. It's just gorgeous. The attention to detail with the aircraft, landscape, water, clouds, etc. is just top-notch all the way. I had a blast just watching my plane fly on auto-pilot from the external free-form camera.

 

Full Screen On
Attempt Stencil Buffer On
Picture Quality Excellent
Advanced Video Options All Highest/Checked

IL2 Sturmovik Summary

Due to time constraints I did not benchmark this game. Also, I'd prefer to benchmark Forgotten Battles (which I do not currently have) instead of this original version. I did play it quite a bit though and was impressed with the Asylum's performance in all but 8XAA @ 1600x1200 where it took a bit of a dive. I didn't see any improvement of 8X AA over 4X AA though so this wasn't a big deal to me.

Next Page: Rise of Nations, Warcraft III, and Dungeon Siege

Last Updated on August 4, 2003


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