Looking Back Pt. 2: X800 & Catalyst Under The Knife

Final Fantasy XI

Moving away from first-person shooters for a bit, the Final Fantasy XI benchmark is an interesting case because of its basis as an MMORPG instead of a single player game. In general, there is much more of a focus on a large number of characters, rather than on the environment or a few highly detailed characters, making it unique among most benchmarks. This is a limited benchmark in that it doesn’t offer a resolution above 1024x768 or works with anti-aliasing (and, hence, no HQ benchmarks), but the different perspective alone makes it worth the effort.

Since this game does not seem to utilize the SM2.0+ feature set, the performance numbers are not particularly surprising. The slight decrease is a bit interesting, since it’s consistent rather than being a product of normal variations in benchmark scores, but even then, there’s not much to say about a sub-5% performance decrease given the relatively high scores. We only hope that this won’t be a continuing trend for this game given the nature of MMORPGs to increase some in graphical complexity over their lifetime.

Catalyst 4.05 versus 6.01 (mouse over to see 4.05)

Looking at the screenshots, and given the lack of a change in performance, the consistency of the screenshots is what we would expect in this case. Clearly, ATI hasn’t made any optimizations either for this game or global optimizations that significantly affect this game.