Darkest of Days Performance Testing Review

ccokeman - September 20, 2009
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Testing:

The object of the exercise here is to see just how well a short list of the higher end video cards from both ATI and Nvidia compare in this Physx-heavy first-person shooter. To make sure this test is not entirely biased, I will run Darkest of Days with both High and Low Physx settings to show just how well each card performs with and without Physx calculations done on the GPU. When I ran this type of test on one of the first really Physx-heavy games, Mirrors Edge, the cards from ATI performed less than spectacularly with Physx enabled in game, while the Nvidia cards gave you the full experience during game play. By disabling Physx, the performance of the video cards was a horse race of sorts, and not a totally one sided race, to be precise. To perform this testing, I will be using my tried and true Core i7 920 testing rig, with the latest drivers from Nvidia 190.62 and ATI Catalyst 9.9. The settings in the respective control panels will be left at default.

Testing Setup:

Processor: Intel Core i7 920 150x20
Motherboard: MSI X58 Eclipse SLI
Memory: Mushkin HP3 12800 7-7-7-20
Video Card(s): See Below
Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: NEC DV5700
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition SP1 64-bit
Case: Thermaltake Armor +

Comparison Video Cards:

Game Settings:

4x Anti-Aliasing
16x Anisotrophic Filtering
Physx: High
Ambient Occlusion: On
Quality: High
Reolution: 1280x1024 - 2560x1600

Higher is Better

With Physx set to high and 4x AA and 16xAF, this game is tough on all the cards. The GTX 295 finished below the GTX 285/GTS 250 combo that takes the Physx workload off of the primary graphics adapter. In this test, even the lowly GTS 250 beats up on the best card ATI currently has to offer. The Physx effects are clearly visible throughout the game and brings a visual quality to the table that makes the game more enjoyable. By reducing the anti-aliasing to 2x or even off entirely, you can increase the performance while keeping the visual effects.