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Benchmark 7

This scene boasts "easy" geometry and a couple of light sources. It is displayed in a single viewport on the entire screen thus being an excellent test of the rasterizing speed in Smooth + Highlights mode.

  • Polygons: 40088;
  • Light source: 2;
  • Mode: Smooth + Highlights.

Benchmark 8

This test is intended to show how fast the graphics cards are when it comes to multiple textures processing. The file contains a lot of textures and very little geometry.

  • Polygons: 224;
  • Light source: 2;
  • Mode: Smooth + Highlights.

Benchmark 9

This benchmark emulates the work on the game level, as it contains both: sufficient geometry and numerous textures. The animation is arranged in such a way that the entire scene could be displayed completely.

  • Polygons: 12548;
  • Light source: 5;
  • Mode: Smooth + Highlights.

Benchmark 10

This test reveals the ability of the graphics accelerators to display textures on the deforming geometry.

  • Polygons: 5048;
  • Light source: 1;
  • Mode: Smooth + Highlights.

Benchmark 11

This test is aimed at showing what the graphics cards are capable of in terms of transparent textures processing.

The new 3ds max 5 features not only the transparency remaining from the previous version, which is imitated by dithering:

But also the 'real" transparency implemented by blending the pixel color of the overlapping objects:

You can shift between the transparency modes in the viewport control panel:

Of course, you can guess that the more correctly implemented transparency will be slower.

  • Polygons: 39940;
  • Light source: 2;
  • Mode: Smooth + Highlights.

Benchmark 12

Here the camera flies through the rocks and hills of the moon surface landscape built of 400 thousand polygons, i.e. the scene is the same as in Benchmark 2, actually. However, the picture is displayed in the Wireframe mode.

  • Polygons: 400008;
  • Light source: 1;
  • Mode: Wireframe.

Benchmark 13

This is the Benchmark 3 scene in wireframe mode:

  • Polygons: 742128;
  • Light source: 1;
  • Mode: Wireframe.

Conclusion

So, the results obtained show that the "professional" ATI cards appear 4 times faster than the gaming ones in the most important geometric benchmarks, in both: wireframe and smooth + highlights modes. Their advantage is not that tremendous in texturing and lighting tests: they are only 1.5 times faster at the most, however, these tests are optimal for gaming graphics cards, unlike the geometric tests mentioned above. Also we can state that NVIDIA Quadro outpaces the "professional" ATI solutions: in the wireframe mode of geometric benchmarks the NVIDIA professional solution showed the same fourfold advantage.

All in all both NVIDIA graphics cards seem to be more preferable for 3ds max 5 users than ATI solutions. However, you should always keep in mind that you will never be able to transform your GeForce4 Ti4600 into Quadro 4 900XGL: starting from the fourth graphics accelerator family NVIDIA is no longer resorting to "easy" ways of distinguishing between the professional and gaming graphics solution, so that the GeForce4 and Quadro 4 GPUs are pretty different on the hardware level.

Anyway, we suggest that you take note of these results, but we wouldn't push you to make up your mind about the best choice for your 3ds max 5 needs right now. Very soon we will have more interesting stuff coming out, namely, we will see how the real professional graphics cards from ATI perform compared to the "professional" solutions we managed to build ourselves :)
 

 
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