Aliens Vs. Predator Test Results

Rebellion, SEGA and Twentieth Century FOX have released the Aliens vs. Predator DirectX 11 Benchmark to the public. As with many of the already released DirectX 11 benchmarks, the Aliens vs. Predator DirectX 11 benchmark leverages your DirectX 11 hardware to provide an immersive game play experience through the use of DirectX 11 Tessellation and DirectX 11 Advanced Shadow features.

In Aliens vs. Predator, DirectX 11 Geometry Tessellation is applied in an effective manner to enhance and more accurately depict HR Giger's famous Alien design. Through the use of a variety of adaptive schemes, applying tessellation when and where it is necessary, the perfect blend of performance and visual fidelity is achieved with at most a 4% change in performance.

DirectX 11 hardware also allows for higher quality, smoother and more natural looking shadows as well. DirectX 11 Advanced Shadows allow for the rendering of high-quality shadows, with smoother, artifact-free penumbra regions, which otherwise could not be realized, again providing for a higher quality, more immersive gaming experience.

Benchmark Reviews is committed to pushing the PC graphics envelope, and whenever possible we configure benchmark software to its maximum settings for our tests. In the case of Aliens vs. Predator, all cards were tested with the following settings: Texture Quality-Very High, Shadow Quality-High, HW Tessellation & Advanced Shadow Sampling-ON, Multi Sample Anti-Aliasing-4x, Anisotropic Filtering-16x, Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)-ON. You will see that this is a challenging benchmark, with all the settings turned up and a screen resolution of 1920 x 1200, as only the HD5870 cards achieved an average frame rate of 30FPS.

This is truly a DirectX11 only benchmark, so we're limited to looking at only the latest generation cards that I had available. This is clearly a tough benchmark, and it's very useful for testing the latest and greatest graphics hardware. The stock ATI HD 5870, with a core clock of 850 MHz, just barely reached 30 FPS as an average frame rate. Using anything less than the top hardware, some scenes had a jumpy quality to them. The overclocked MSI N460GTX HAWK got the closest, in terms of smooth video quality, with an average frame rate of 24 FPS at factory clocks, and almost 29 FPS at its maximum speed. In this instance, the lower spec'd GTX460 just edged out the HD 5830, no doubt due to its tessellation muscle.

I chose Aliens vs. Predator to do most of my major overclock trials with. It drives the cards really hard, and will crash at the first sign of misbehavior. It also recovers nicely, which is handy for repeated testing where you are constantly probing the limits. At the maximum clock rate that I could keep stable, which was 952 MHz on the core and 1904 on the shaders, the AvP benchmark was running reliably at 28.8 FPS. Temps were moderate, at 55C with 100% fan settings, even after a dozen consecutive runs.

In our next section, we investigate the thermal performance of the EVGA GTX460 SC, and see how well the reference cooler works on the latest Fermi offering.

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