UT2004
Before we get too deep into more traditional benchmarks, let's take a quick detour through the game of the hour, Unreal Tournament 2004. One of the first things I tried when I set up the DeltaChrome S8 Nitro was the UT2004 Demo, because I wanted to see whether the card could handle the best multiplayer shooter I've seen in a long, long while. To my surprise and delight, the S8 Nitro ran the UT2004 demo very well. At 1280x960 resolution, the game is fast and fluid, with few slowdowns and solid playability.

The UT2004 has demo recording disabled, so I wasn't able to create a scripted benchmark for it. Alternately, I decided to fire up the game and run a frame rate capture program to see how it played over time. I repeated this procedure with all three cards, playing through an Onslaught botmatch with each one. I have no illusions about the numbers logged using this procedure being precisely comparable to one another. I didn't move around in exactly the same way each time I played, and the game's motion and interactions are simply too involved to make that practical. Still, I do think the overall picture is enlightening.

My strategy was the same for each game: hop into the Raptor immediately and head for the far power node (the "tank node") on my team's side of the map to build it up. Then, once the node is built, criss-cross the map to build the opposite "tank node" before the other team could do so. The cards played like so:

These results seem to confirm my subjective impressions. For the most part, the S8 Nitro played this game at 1280x960 in a fashion more or less equivalent to the mid-range ATI and NVIDIA cards. However, at certain points in the game, the frame rates dropped a little more than I'd have liked. In particular, the DeltaChrome's frame rates seemed to suffer when lots of smoke was in the air. I recall one sequence in particular when the S8 Nitro struggled a little, when I was in a badly wounded tank storming through the valley down the middle of the map. Smoke was pouring out of my vehicle, and the card couldn't quite keep up its end of the bargain. The effect wasn't terrible, but frame rates were perceptibly lower. Overall, though, the S8 Nitro was very competent to run UT in that resolution.

The game looked great, too. Below are a couple of screenshots to give you some idea.

In UT2004, the DeltaChrome looks and plays, to the casual observer, very much like the competing GeForce or Radeon.

Unfortunately, I had less luck with another hot new game, Far Cry. The Far Cry demo didn't look right at all with its default settings on the S8 Nitro. Of course, both the game and the video drivers are still in beta, so the incompatibility was no great shock.