Vertex Shader

This test requires hardware vertex shaders support. GeForce4 MX440-8x executes them via software and thus is excluded from this test. Xabre 600 also executes vertex shaders at the software level (Vertexlizer technology), but it managed to cheat 3DMark03 and run the test  :) .

So, what do we see? This is one more test where RADEON 9700 PRO is the leader. Well, judging by the tests, RADEON 9700 PRO, 9500 PRO and 9500 work very well with vertex shaders. Other graphics cards can’t compete with the two latest ATI’s solutions, except GeForceFX 5800 Ultra. Well, I can congratulate ATI fans with this victory :)

The sixth position after the four RADEON 9x00 based graphics cards and GeForceFX is assigned to GeForce4 Ti4600 and GeForce4 Ti4800. Both graphics cards run equally fast, showing a bit higher result than RADEON 9100. and this is again very easy to explain if we calculate the number of pipelines in every chip responsible for vertex shaders implementation. GeForce4 Titanium solutions feature two units like that, while RADEON 9700 PRO, 9500 PRO and 9500 – four. That is why GeForce4 GPUs lose to the more advanced RADEONs here.

Xabre 600 with its software vertex shaders execution can’t even reach GeForce4 Ti4200-8x, although we used a powerful CPU – Pentium 4 2.8GHz.

GeForce3 Ti200 proves the slowest in this test. It’s quite natural as this was the first GPU from NVIDIA to feature hardware vertex shaders support. It has only one vertex pipeline and works at the lowest frequencies of all participating solutions: 175MHz.

Overall, “Vertex Shader” test seems to be a very accurate tool for measuring vertex shaders execution speed. All the results we’ve got comply with the theoretical presuppositions pretty much. 

Pixel Shader 2.0

This test measures the system performance during the execution of ver.2.0 pixel shaders. Of course, this test can only run on cards supporting DirectX9. So, we will take a look at the results shown by GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, Radeon 9700 PRO, RADEON 9500 PRO and RADEON 9500.

Well, NVIDIA has still to improve the GPU and drivers. GeForceFX 5800 Ultra loses here to all R300 based solutions from ATI: even to 64MB RADEON 9500. A triumph of ATI, no doubt :).