Tomb Raider : Angel of Darkness

A series of grisly murders brings Lara into conflict with a sinister Alchemist from the past, and a secret alliance of powerful individuals shrouded in mystery. Accused of the murder of her one time mentor, Werner Von Croy, Lara becomes a fugitive on the run. Pursued by the police, she follows the Alchemist into a dark world of blood, betrayal and vengeance where it is up to her to defeat this unholy alliance, and stop them from unleashing their incredible powers on the world.

Angel of Darkness employs a brand new engine with Lara now made up of over 5,000 polygons as opposed to just 500 in previous Tomb Raider games. The range of special effects create a batch of cool visuals.

From the many kinds of water (mercurial liquid forms, good surface texturing, and realistic pools of water) to fire (heat blurs and colorful fiery pits), to the game's many light effects (lots of shadowing, multiple light sources and effective reflections), Core mixes more realistic settings with special effects to create a well-rounded whole. It is worth mentioning though that Tomb Raider: AOD uses pixel shader 2.0 technology at a higher extent than Halo does.

- Tomb Raider:AOD Benchmark

I recorded a timedemo on the Paris stage. The particular scene where the timedemo was recorded, is full of complicated fire effects. This benchmark stresses a lot of the cards' pixel shading process and we believe that this is the ultimate pixel shader 2.0 game benchmark.

I grabbed the fps from the timedemo twice. Once with the Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering off (Trillinear was used instead), and once more with AA at 4x and Anisotropic Filtering mode enabled from the game's settings console .

The raw power of the NV40 core shows itself mostly at the 1600x1200 resolution, where it returned the incredible for the particular benchmark, 39 fps.

It seems that there is no match for Gainward's CoolFX 6800 Ultra from among the previous generation's best VGA cards.