Aliens Vs. Predator Test Results

Rebellion, SEGA and Twentieth Century FOX have released the Aliens vs. Predator DirectX 11 Benchmark to the public. As with many of the already released DirectX 11 benchmarks, the Aliens vs. Predator DirectX 11 benchmark leverages your DirectX 11 hardware to provide an immersive game play experience through the use of DirectX 11 Tessellation and DirectX 11 Advanced Shadow features.

In Aliens vs. Predator, DirectX 11 Geometry Tessellation is applied in an effective manner to enhance and more accurately depict HR Giger's famous Alien design. Through the use of a variety of adaptive schemes, applying tessellation when and where it is necessary, the perfect blend of performance and visual fidelity is achieved with at most a 4% change in performance.

DirectX 11 hardware also allows for higher quality, smoother and more natural looking shadows as well. DirectX 11 Advanced Shadows allow for the rendering of high-quality shadows, with smoother, artifact-free penumbra regions, which otherwise could not be realized, again providing for a higher quality, more immersive gaming experience.

Benchmark Reviews is committed to pushing the PC graphics envelope, and whenever possible we configure benchmark software to its maximum settings for our tests. In the case of Aliens vs. Predator, all cards were tested with the following settings: Texture Quality-Very High, Shadow Quality-High, HW Tessellation & Advanced Shadow Sampling-ON, Multi Sample Anti-Aliasing-4x, Anisotropic Filtering-16x, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)-ON. You will see that this is a challenging benchmark, with all the settings turned up and a screen resolution of 1920 x 1200, as only the HD5870 cards achieved an average frame rate of 30FPS.

This is truly a DirectX11 only benchmark, so we're limited to looking at only the latest generation cards that I had available. This is clearly a tough benchmark, and it's very useful for testing the latest and greatest graphics hardware. The stock ATI HD 5870, with a core clock of 850 MHz, just barely reached 30 FPS as an average frame rate. Using anything less than the top hardware, some scenes had a jumpy quality to them. The overclocked N460GTX got the closest, in terms of smooth video quality, with an average frame rate of 27 FPS. Once again, the GTX 460 put the hurt on the HD 5830, piling up some real pressure on the existing cards in this price sector.

In our next section, we investigate the thermal performance of the MSI N460GTX Cyclone, and see how well MSI's Cyclone cooler works on the latest Fermi offering.

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