ATI vs NVIDIA: Driver performance under Win98 & Win2K

Human Head Studios' Rune
http://www.humanhead.com/

Rune is a third person perspective game based on the UnrealTournament engine from Epic.  Since it made use of the same engine as UnrealTournament, we managed to record a quick demo and use the engine's built-in timedemo function to measure performance. 

The default 3D accelerated mode, like in UnrealTournament, is Direct3D, which is what we used to conduct the performance tests.  The settings were all left at default with the exception of resolution and color depth which were set to 1024 x 768 and 32-bits respectively.

You can see that both ATI and NVIDIA take a performance hit when moving to Windows 2000. 

The Radeon dropped in performance by 17%, falling a full 10 fps in the timedemo.  NVIDIA's deficit was slightly lower yet still noticeable with the GeForce2 GTS painfully enduring a 12% drop.