MSI FX5950 Ultra - Page 7

Codecreatures

Code Creatures is a synthetic 3D benchmark that is a good reference for VGA performance comparisons. This is a high-end 3D benchmark that also requires DirectX 8 hardware, making a good tool for measuring the potential of DirectX 8 game performance.

The Code Creatures benchmark is written with Microsoft's DirectX 8.1 API and incorporates the use of Vertex and PixelShaders, popular on next generation 3D accelerators.

The benchmark plays a photo-realistic nature scene and calculates the performance of the graphics adapter by measuring the fps that it can display at 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions. The score is a geometric mean of those three resolutions called the Code Creatures number.

For this Benchmark, I grabbed average FPS results for the following resolutions: 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200.

The FX5950U did very well here. If Code Creatures is run on a P4 2.8GHz at 60fps at 1024x768 resolution, compared to the X800's performance, then the MSI FX5950 Ultra's performance is tolerable at 52fps. At higher resolutions however, the performance is not satisfactory, especially when compared to the ASUS AX X800 which remains fairly constant.

- Code Creatures number

The Code Creatures number is the resultant score of the total benchmarking process which includes some other measurements except for a plain sum up of the fps results. MSI's card lags behind the Asus X800XT by a difference of 1550 Code Creature points. It could have been worse so I'm pretty much satisfied with the result.