Legit Reviews

Tropics Benchmark is a GPU benchmark based on the advanced Unigine™ engine from Unigine Corp. Originally released in 2008. The benchmark depicts tropical paradise: waves of the infinite ocean leisurely rolls over the sun-splashed shores of lagoon islands. The sunset paints straw huts with warm colors while the mild breeze gently stirs the coconut palm leaves. Hovering high in the tranquil sky the gulls are watching crabs crawling on the velvety sand among the abandoned boats. Unigine Tropics features Support of DirectX 9, DirectX 10, DirectX 10.1 and now in version 1.3, OpenGL 4.0 (or OpenGL 3.3 for GeForce 9 and 200 series).

The Unigine Tropics benchmark has the same API options as Heaven, but what it calls DirectX 11 is actually DirectX 10.1 as the benchmark does not have any D3D11 support. Since DirectX 10.1 is ATI specific it will not be used. DirectX 9 and 10 settings are showed above, with OpenGL 4.0/3.3 settings only differing by using 2x AF and 2x AA instead of 8x and 4x respectively.

This OpenGL benchmark heavily favors the NVIDIA architecture, so much that the GT 240 almost performs as well as the HD 5770. This leads me to believe that overall OpenGL will run better on NVIDIA hardware just because of the architecture design, so take that into account if you primarily plan to run OpenGL applications such as CAD, flight simulation, and workstation duties among other things (ie. not mainstream gaming).

The AXLE Radeon HD 5670 is again very close to the GT 240 and 9600 GSO in DirectX 9 while separated from the higher cards by a wide margin.

In DirectX 10 the higher NVIDIA cards do slightly better but the lower cards struggle at higher resolutions where the HD 5670 does proportionately better at the higher resolution (thanks to its 1GB frame buffer no doubt).