3D Card Benchmarks - Expendable Demo

Good ole' Expendable is far from a very fresh or exiting 3D game these days, but what can the stressed out reviewer do if there's hardly any Direct3D benchmarks around? Expendable is really more suited for CPU benchmarking than 3D card testing, because the CPU remains the limiting factor up until you reach very high resolutions, but what else can you use?

What an exciting picture! As already said, Expendable is more of a CPU benchmark. The 3D card performance doesn't kick in before we reach 1280x1024 and this only because we are using a Giga Hertz Pentium III.

GeForce2 shows its lead over the rest at high resolutions, but I do admit that this benchmark is far from convincing. However, who likes to admit that 4 hours of benchmarking under stress conditions were nothing but wasted time?

Well, there's no reason to expect miracles from Expendable at 32-bit color as well. ATi's Rage Fury MAXX uses the well known 16-bit Z-buffer trick and performs just as good as GeForce2, which is also able to use this trick now. Quadro takes advantage of its 64 MB video memory and the 'old' GeForce turns out to be the loser.