NVIDIA's Fall Product Line: GeForce3 Titanium

Wolfenstein MP Test

In the tradition of id releases, the upcoming Return to Castle Wolfenstein game was introduced in a publicly available Multiplayer Online Test. If you haven't tried the game yet we suggest downloading a copy and enjoying it yourself. The game is based on a modified version of the Quake III engine with an updated look to the graphics. We recorded two quick demos for this test by hopping on a random online server and going at it for a few; one outside on the beach with many players visible and some very big explosions and the other inside the compound with very few players. You can download the two demos here.

We tested with the built in "High Quality" settings enabled and texture filtering changed from Bilinear to Trilinear. To run the benchmark do the following:

1) Extract the demo files to c:\PathToWolfMPTest\demomain\demos\
2) Bring down the console by hitting the '~' key
3) Type 'timedemo 1' and hit enter
4) Type 'demo atdemo6' and hit enter to run the first demo, or 'demo atdemo8' to run the second demo.

As you can see this first demo is very stressing on the overall platform. With the exception of the Radeon 64DDR and Kyro II, all of the cards perform within about 10% of one another. To improve the worst case scenario performance in Wolfenstein it looks like you're going to need more than just a fast video card.

At 1600 x 1200 we see memory bandwidth limitations come into play as the three GeForce3 cards take the lead. The Radeon 7500 is able to slightly nudge the newcomer GeForce2 Ti 200 out of its fourth place position. Again, the Radeon 7500 is no where near the performance of the GeForce3 Ti 200.

Without much action going on the performance of the cards skyrocket, but they are still not able to reach the Quake III Arena frame rates just yet. Obviously the game isn't final yet so we can expect to see some improvements in performance but the standings should not change much at all.

Again we see some very respectable frame rates out of the top three or four cards but the real concern should be how low the frame rate will drop which we've already showed you is more than half of what you see here.