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The Test
All tests were run on a clean installation of Windows ME with all drivers installed. No other programs were left running in the background while tests were running, no screen savers or power saving features were configured and the mouse was left still for the entire duration of the benchmark. Each test was run three times, and the average of the three scores are shown within the results shown here.
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Configuration |
| Video |
ATI Radeon VE 32MB DDR
PowerColor GeForce2 MX400 64MB Tri-View*
PowerColor Sniper2 TNT2 Pro
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| Operating System |
Microsoft Windows ME (4.90.3000) |
| Special Drivers |
NVIDIA Detonator 3 Reference drivers (12.41) for NVIDIA cards
ATI Radeon VE drivers (4.13.7115)
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| Software |
3DMark2001
Quake 3: Arena
Serious Sam v1.02
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* Review to be posted soon.
For this test, I had to pull out my old PowerColor TNT2 Pro 32MB video card. You'll see in a second why I did this…
Driver Settings
Usually, I do not go over which driver settings I used when running benchmarks, but in this case, I should go over which settings I had to change for the Radeon VE's drivers in order to obtain fair results.
First of all, I ran OpenGL tests with the "Performance" setting checked. I had to, however, uncheck the box (or circle) that says "Convert 32-bit Textures to 16-bit," which would basically force the Radeon VE to run with 16-bit textures even if the game settings says 32-bit.
The second setting that I had to modify is the one in the Direct3D tab. As you can see from the screenshot below, the setting says 16;24, which means that the depth of the Z-Buffer, a portion of the graphics system that is used to store the depth of each pixel in the scene, will only run at a maximum depth of 24-bits. The proper setting, and fair setting, would be to change it to 16;24;32, which would allow a Z-Buffer depth of 32-bits.
 On to: Quake III Results
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