Chaintech GeForce AA6800 Apogee Review - Page 6 of 7
By Jonathan Martini - October 31, 2004
NEED FOR SPEED: UNDERGROUND DEMO
With the upcoming launch of Need for Speed: Underground 2, my interest in the aging series has spiked once again. While I prefer the more realistic approach provided by Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed, there's no denying that the Underground series allows us to satisfy the street racer craving in all of us.
Need for Speed: Underground
The detail setting was maxed out on the first display settings screen, as with the advanced settings. Testing was composed of running the car though 12-15 drag races with FRAPS being enabled at the start and ending when the run completed (either after having passed the finish line, or immediately after a crash). The maximum and minimum FPS of all the runs were posted here, with the average of the averages of all the runs displayed.
Need for Speed: Underground Performance
EA has never been famous for producing well performing engines. You can't blame them as they are adaptable enough to run on a variety of platforms. Note that these results are performed solely at 4X antialiasing and 8X anisotropic filtering as enabling the image enhancing technologies didn't hinder the performance.
RACE DRIVER 2 DEMO
Race Driver is a fairly little known racing game where the in-game avatar progresses from the local race leagues to international fame. The game features a big variety of different types of cars with which to race, from supercars to 18-wheelers. While the graphics aren't groundbreaking, they are on the pretty side with the car models being very brightly colored and well modeled.
Race Driver 2
Testing was performed by selecting the V8 Supercars option from the demo and completing three laps for each run. The default quality setting was selected for the game, which translates to the following:
Race Driver 2 Settings
Antialiasing is a welcomed feature in brightly colored games such as this. The contrast between colors is an eyesore and polygonal jaggies are plentiful on every frame.
Race Driver 2 Performance
The ideal setting for Race Driver 2 on the test system is at 1024x768 with 2XAA and 4XAF. The higher settings produced decent frame rates, however the responsiveness of the game seemed a tad slower and ruined the test runs on multiple occasions.
X2 The Threat
X2 The Threat is a space game where one can succeed in a variety of different ways, be it by looting, becoming an economical conglomerate or become part of the law enforcement. In short, it's a large sandbox that can be played with in a variety of different ways. However, its beauty lies not only in the ways it can be played but by the graphics as well.
X2 The Threat
Egosoft provided a rolling demo to benchmark the game. The demo is fairly long, but covers a gamut of different views and spaceship flybys that it's definitely worth a gander on more than one occasion.
X2 The Threat Rolling Demo Performance
The shadows feature greatly enhances the cinematographical display of the interesting scenes, however it bogs the performance quite a bit.
