Age of Mythology: The Titans, Freelancer
This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.
Age of Mythology: The Titans |
Age of Mythology has always been a favourite in my household and we’ve spent hours working ourselves up to the point where we can play computer opponents on Hard difficulty without much of a problem. You can imagine my joy when the expansion “The Titans” came out for this epic real-time strategy game. To commemorate this event, I created a new Scenario using the map editor based on the Alfheim map (one of my favourites). I placed about opposing 80 units on 3 teams in the middle of the map and let them slug it out. Just for fun, I put a Titan and Cronos in there to make things interesting.
Game
Configuration
|
|
Color Depth | 32 bits |
Effects (i.e. foot prints) | All enabled |
Anisotropic Filtering and Anti-aliasing | Disabled |
Min and Max Frame Rates | Asus
Radeon 9800XT
|
FX5950
Ultra
|
Softmod
R9500
|
||||
Min
|
Max
|
Min
|
Max
|
Min
|
Max
|
||
1024×768 | 0x0 |
44
|
78
|
35
|
76
|
41
|
77
|
4×8 |
45
|
78
|
40
|
80
|
40
|
77
|
|
1600×1200 | 0x0 | 41
|
76
|
28
|
62
|
44
|
70
|
4×8 | 45
|
73
|
40
|
61
|
30
|
61
|
The Asus Radeon 9800XT has no problems running Age of Mythology: The Titans.
In fact, it produces the best performance numbers I have seen since using
this game in reviews back in May 2003. The minimum numbers are encouraging
as they are well above 30 FPS which means that there will be very little
lag while trying to control your villagers and coordinate a defence/attack.
Comparing the Softmod Radeon 9500, you can see that it isn’t far behind the FX5950 Ultra! It’d be very interesting to see the performance of a 9600XT compared to the FX5950 Ultra in this game.
As an aside… For those of you who read our FX5700 Ultra review you may remember the strange behaviour on FX cards where the frame rates dropped drastically at 1600×1200. You’ll be happy to know that the FX5950 Ultra does not seem to exhibit the same problem.
Freelancer |
Each time I play this game for hardware testing, I can’t but feel that this game needs a sequel. The game feels like an introduction to something more epic, similar how Halo is merely an introduction to a larger story. My meanderings aside, Freelancer is still very popular amoung space sim and action fans alike. I’ve chosen the final mission of Freelancer again as my “benchmark” level as it contains the largest amount of targets in any of the missions.
Game
Configuration
|
|
Level of Detail | Maximum (HUD animations, effects, etc.) |
Min and Max Frame Rates | Asus
Radeon 9800XT
|
NVIDIA
FX5950 Ultra
|
Softmod
R9500
|
||||
Min
|
Max
|
Min
|
Max
|
Min
|
Max
|
||
1024×768 | 0x0 |
35
|
111
|
17
|
94
|
21
|
104
|
4×8 |
35
|
118
|
14
|
97
|
23
|
118
|
|
1600×1200 | 0x0 | 10
|
107
|
10
|
94
|
6
|
115
|
4×8 | 10
|
114
|
8
|
106
|
14
|
112
|
The Asus Radeon 9800XT performs extremely well in this game. There wasn’t a single setting where I didn’t feel nice fluid motion even with Nomad fighters swarming all over the screen. The slowest it got was at 1600×1200 when there was a very large explosion on the screen, but that dip in performance was very brief. Surprisingly, the softmod R9500 performs very similarly to the more expensive Radeon 9800XT at 1024×768. NVIDIA cards never seemed to perform well in this game for some reason. Here we see even the softmod Radeon 9500 meeting or beating the NVIDIA FX5950 Ultra.