Sub-$200 Video Card Roundup - April 2002

Comanche 4

For years we've searched for a good flight simulator benchmark and we've always run into the same problem, we've never been able to find one with built-in benchmark capabilities. Luckily, NovaLogic released a benchmark demo of their DirectX 8.1 Comanche 4 flight sim. We ran the publicly available demo (which you can get here) with all options set to high and sound disabled.

Comanche 4 800x600x32

NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 128MB NVIDIA GeForce3 64MB NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 460 64MB ATI Radeon 8500 64MB ATI Radeon 8500LE 128MB NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 64MB NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 64MB ATI Radeon 7500 64MB NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 64MB 43.0 38.0 37.7 35.7 35.7 35.6 34.7 34.4 23.9 | 0 | 9 | 17 | 26 | 34 | 43 | 52

Much like what we saw with Jedi Knight 2, Commanche 4 seems to be very CPU bound at 800x600. Let's see how things fare as we increase the resolution a bit.

Comanche 4 1024x768x32

NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 128MB NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 460 64MB NVIDIA GeForce3 64MB ATI Radeon 8500LE 128MB ATI Radeon 8500 64MB ATI Radeon 7500 64MB NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 64MB NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 64MB NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 64MB 42.7 35.5 35.1 35.1 34.1 31.8 31.5 31.4 18.3 | 0 | 9 | 17 | 26 | 34 | 43 | 5

The GeForce4 Ti 4200 manages to pull away from the majority of the contenders but its still clear that this DX8 test isn't very GPU bound. It's also interesting to note that the extra 64MB of memory on the Radeon 8500LE more than makes up for the 9% core/memory speed deficit when compared to the 64MB 8500 in this test.

Comanche 4 1280x1024x32

NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 128MB ATI Radeon 8500LE 128MB ATI Radeon 8500 64MB NVIDIA GeForce3 64MB NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 460 64MB NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 64MB ATI Radeon 7500 64MB NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 64MB NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 400 64MB 40.3 33.0 31.1 30.4 29.6 26.7 26.3 24.1 13.0 | 0 | 8 | 16 | 24 | 32 | 40 | 48

Here we have the GeForce4 Ti 4200 go head to head with the Radeon 8500LE and in this case it comes out approximately 22% faster.