ATI vs NVIDIA: Driver performance under Win98 & Win2K

Bioware's MDK2
http://www.bioware.com

Our third title in this comparison is MDK2, another third person perspective game although this time, an OpenGL title.

The MDK2 demo comes with a built in benchmark that is executable from the game's control panel.  The only settings changes we made were resolution and color-depth.

Both ATI and NVIDIA take a performance hit here as they did in the first benchmark with Rune.  What is interesting in this comparison is that NVIDIA actually takes a larger performance hit than ATI does which is completely unexpected, especially judging by what we thought was representative's of NVIDIA's driver performance when we ran Quake III Arena in our earlier reviews.

In any case, the GeForce2 falls behind by approximately 12% under Windows 2000 while ATI drops 10%.  The two performance differences are very close to one another however the fact that a similar drop exists across two separate manufacturers indicates that maintaining performance improvement under Windows 2000 isn't as simple as we once thought.

Now that we have seen a performance drop occur under both a Direct3D and an OpenGL game we can't attribute the drop to a particular API being less optimized under one OS.  Let's continue on and see what else pops up.