3D Studio MAX Benchmarks

Benchmark 1: 4 Views Rendering Test

The first benchmark is a certain "stress-test". It plays an animated scene in four viewports at the same time. However, the rendering methods set in these viewports are different. The scene in two upper viewports is in "Wireframe" mode, in the lower left viewport - in "Smooth + HighLights" + "Edged Faces", and in lower right viewport - in "Smooth + HighLights".

Also we enabled Anti-Aliased Lines for viewports working in Wireframe mode. Since only upper viewports worked in this mode, the thing didn't influence the lower viewports at all. This scene contains very few polygons, only 24 thousand. However, since the animation was played in all four viewports simultaneously, the resulting fps rate appeared not very high.

• Polygons: 28868
• Light sources: 1
• Mode: Wireframe, Smooth + Highlights

Benchmark 2: Blit Test

The second benchmark represents a scene with 7 standard primitives, which make the scene complexity equal to 10 thousand polygons.

There are six static objects in the scene and the seventh one is moving slowly across the entire scene passing through other objects. This benchmark checks if the intersecting objects are displayed correctly and if the graphics card and the driver cope with this task fast enough.

• Polygons: 9712
• Light sources: 1
• Mode: Smooth + Highlights

Benchmark 3: Dual Planes Visualization Test

The scene from the third benchmark shows a ball, which is moving very slowly against the background geometry made of 15000 polygons.

The ball doesn't cross any other objects. Since it moves very slowly, then the "perfect" driver will make very few changes to each further frame. In other words, this benchmarks checks if the graphics card is capable of drawing anew only those objects, which got really changed.

• Polygons: 15653
• Light sources: 1
• Mode: Smooth + Highlights

Benchmark 4: Geometry Visualization Test 1

This benchmark shows if the graphics card is good at processing very complex geometry in Smooth + Highlights mode.

• Polygons: 200270
• Light sources: 1
• Mode: Smooth + Highlights

Benchmark 5: Geometry Visualization Test 2

The fifth benchmark is devoted to testing the graphics cards abilities in terms of processing complex geometry only. This time the amount of polygons nearly doubled and made 376 thousand. The same surface, as in the previous benchmark scene, is now covered with buildings.

This benchmark can easily bring any graphics card to its knees: the average fps rate hardly reaches 3 frames. However, you should bear in mind that this is just a benchmark testing the card's geometric performance. The file was surely created not with the 3fps. Each building was designed in a separate file and when it was added to the entire scene, some part of the geometry was disabled in order to increase the performance.

• Polygons: 376875
• Light sources: 1
• Mode: Smooth + Highlights

Benchmark 6: Lighting Visualization Test 1

Having taken a look at the graphics cards performance when working with geometry, we suggest passing over to the imitation of multiple light sources. This test offers 8 SpotLights, which are constantly moving and lighting some kind of asteroid.

We should point out that imitating the effect made by SpotLights is a much more resource-hungry process than the imitation of Omni or Directional lighting.

• Polygons: 39600
• Light sources: 8
• Mode: Smooth + Highlights

Benchmark 7: Lighting Visualization Test 2

Here we see the same asteroid, but this time it is lit by 8 Directional lights. Directional lights are slower than Omni lights, but faster than SpotLights.

• Polygons: 39600
• Light sources: 8
• Mode: Smooth + Highlights

Benchmark 8: Lighting Visualization Test 3

One more time we see the same asteroid with the lights coming from 8 different sources. But now these are all Omni lights, the fastest lights in 3D MAX.

• Polygons: 39600
• Light sources: 8
• Mode: Smooth + Highlights

Benchmark 9: Rasterization Visualization Test

The ninth benchmark is a scene with light geometry, including only 4500 polygons, which occupies the entire viewport. It is aimed at testing the rasterizing speed.

When the camera is moving, the graphics card should rasterize big and small polygons (relative to the screen size).

• Polygons: 4684
• Light sources: 1
• Mode: Smooth + Highlights

Benchmark 10: Texture Visualization Test 1

The next benchmark is devoted to work with textures. The file contains a lot of textures and very little geometry (224 polygons). As for the benchmark, it is just a rotating spherical polygon with the facets covered with 48 different textures.

Very little geometry and many textures involved give us a perfect idea of how fast the graphics cards can process these textures.

• Polygons: 224
• Light sources: 1
• Mode: Smooth + Highlights

Benchmark 11: Texture Visualization Test 2

This is a fully textured room with a camera moving inside. This benchmark is very close to real applications because it has a lot of textures, not very simple geometry and several light sources. It shows what graphics cards are capable of when processing pretty complex scenes in Smooth + Highlights mode.

• Polygons: 12413
• Light sources: 8
• Mode: Smooth + Highlights

Benchmark 12: Texture Visualization Test 3

Animated "waves" with the 114KB texture laid over them show how fast the card can deform very light geometry and modify smaller textures.

• Polygons: 880
• Light sources: 1
• Mode: Smooth + Highlights

Benchmark 13: Wireframe Visualization Test

This benchmark runs with different speeds in the Wireframe mode. 111 thousand polygons in Wireframe mode will be a really tough test for any modern graphics card. Just as in the very first benchmark we enabled Anti-Aliasing here:

• Polygons: 11270
• Light sources: 1
• Mode: Wireframe

All the benchmarks described above are recommended by 3D MAX developers. However, as we have already seen, they are aimed at testing different functions and their implementation separately from one another. Since there are no "general" tests there, we decided to add one more benchmark to this set: a scene with 8 light sources, 61371 polygons and a great lot of transparent surfaces. The file with all textures makes 6MB total size and its complexity is quite typical of the today's 3D projects. We also included some animation to provide more realistic testing conditions: the camera is moving around the room capturing all objects. This is how the first frame looks after the final rendering is done:

We used this scene to test graphics cards in Wireframe mode as well as in Smooth + Highlights mode. As a result we've got two benchmarks:

Benchmark 14: Complex Wireframe Visualization Test

The scene in Wireframe mode:

• Polygons: 61371
• Light sources: 8
• Mode: Wireframe

Benchmark 15: Complex Shading Visualization Test

The same scene in Smooth + Highlights mode:

• Polygons: 61371
• Light sources: 8
• Mode: Smooth + Highlights