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Untitled Document
With a product such as this, performance is very important. As the graphics
chip is integrated into the machine, it cannot be upgraded. So, not only does
it need to perform well on current games, it also needs to perform on future
games to make it worth while. The drivers provided to us weren't the most up
to date, so we used the Omega
drivers, based on the 4.10 Catalyst beta.
3D Mark 03 gives us a score of 2372. If last years christmas
graphics card round up is anything to go by, this gives us performance slower
than a desktop ATi 9600 Pro, but faster than a desktop nVidia 5600.
We decided to take Doom 3 and Far Cry and see if it is possible to get a playable
speed with good visual quality.
Doom 3
Considering the 64MB frame buffer, we selected "Low Quality" which
compresses the textures more than normal. Everything else was left on full and
then a precached timedemo was run. One advantage to an nVidia solution is their
UltraShadow technology which boosts Doom 3 performance considerably. We benchmarked
with and without shadows on, to see if any performance gains were to be had
by turning it off.
| |
Shadows ON (fps) |
Shadows OFF (fps) |
| 640 x 480 |
43.4 |
71.0 |
| 800 x 600 |
29.1 |
47.3 |
| 1024 x 768 |
19.1 |
31.3 |
Doom 3 is a very taxing game and this machine just about runs it at 640x480.
With an average of ~45fps there is a high chance certain areas will have unnacceptable
slow downs. However, turning shadows off has a huge impact, with over 50% improvement
in performance. For multiplayer gaming, shadows will not affect your game play
a lot and they are well worth sacrificing.
Far Cry
Far Cry just isn't worth playing with anything below medium settings, so this
we kept settings at this and tested with the following resolutions.
| |
Medium (fps) |
High (fps) |
| 640 x 480 |
76.88 |
49.63 |
| 800 x 600 |
51.34 |
34.77 |
| 1024 x 768 |
34.7 |
|
This results are fairly impressive being more than fully playable at these
settings. We were so impressed with the results, we decided to run some tests
with high settings (not highest) and found even that was fairly playable.
Overclocking
Just like any desktop card, overclocking is quite feasable and could be absolutely
necessary for running future games. Using ATi
Tool we increased our card from a core speed of 320MHz and a memory speed
of 210MHz (effective 420), to a whopping 410/240. That's nearly 100MHz faster
on the core and brings it close to the speed of a Mobility Radeon 9700.
At this speed, we saw an increase in Doom 3 at 640x480, from 43.4fps to 60.0fps.
That is a 30% improvement in performance and will certainly help when tackling
games such as Half Life 2.
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