ATI vs NVIDIA: Driver performance under Win98 & Win2K

Rage Software's Expendable
http://www.rage.co.uk

Expendable is another third person perspective game that employ's Rage's own custom engine.  The Direct3D game is aging however we still use it as a gauge for system memory bandwidth performance and it is a very useful benchmark for driver comparisons.

We ran Expendable with the built in timedemo feature by executing go.exe with the '- timedemo' switch.  The only settings we changed were resolution and color-depth.

The Radeon test bed exhibited a huge performance drop under Expendable from 87 fps down to 47 fps, a decline of 40 frames per second or 46%.  We ran the test numerous times and continually came up with the same results.  We originally thought that v-sync hadn't been disabled but the frame rate peaked at above 70 fps during the test while the refresh rate was held to 60 fps therefore ruling out that theory. 

In spite of this, NVIDIA's performance is relatively unchanged between 98 and 2000 with a small increase under the professional OS. 

It is worth noting that using ATI's officially supported release drivers (v5.0.3035) under Windows 2000 the game is completely unplayable.  The background textures are missing as are the textures for all of the characters and most of the objects although they do clip in randomly.  We did test with the latest special-purpose (unofficial) drivers (v5.13.1.3100) however we did run a quick compatibility test with the release drivers to check for any anomalies. 

This problem was not present in any of NVIDIA's driver candidates.