X-bit labs

ATI RADEON 8500 vs NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti500 in 3ds max 4

Category: Video

by FastSite

[ 02/01/2002 | 12:00 AM ]

ATI solutions have always been somewhat slow in 3ds max applications, mostly because of the "raw" drivers.ATI software developers tried many times to improve the situation. This article will show ushow correct the current OpenGL driver for RADEON 8500 is and what influence it has on the performance and imagequality in 3ds max 4.

Table of contents:

• Image Quality
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance
  
• Benchmark 1: 4 Views Rendering Test
  
• Benchmark 2: Blit Test
  
• Benchmark 3: Dual Planes Visualization Test
  
• Benchmark 4: Geometry Visualization Test 1
  
• Benchmark 5: Geometry Visualization Test 2
  
• Benchmark 6: Lighting Visualization Test 1
  
• Benchmark 7: Lighting Visualization Test 2
  
• Benchmark 8: Lighting Visualization Test 3
  
• Performance
  
• Benchmark 9: Rasterization Visualization Test
  
• Benchmark 10: Texture Visualization Test 1
  
• Benchmark 11: Texture Visualization Test 2
  
• Benchmark 12: Texture Visualization Test 3
  
• Benchmark 13: Wireframe Visualization Test
  
• Benchmark 14: Complex Wireframe Visualization Test
  
• Benchmark 15: Complex Shading Visualization Test
  
• Conclusion
  

For a long time ATI was playing the role of "the catching up" in the gaming graphics card market compared with the market leader, NVIDIA. The reasons of this state of thins are more than evident: since the times of Rage128 ATI was making really good 3D graphics cards, which perfect hardware implementation was brought to complete naught by raw drivers, because the performance of the graphics solutions turned out much lower than that of the NVIDIA based cards. Moreover, ATI cards used to cost more than the graphics cards from well-known manufacturers built on NVIDIA chips. Besides, the image quality and correctness provided by the drivers, i.e. the support of functions required to build proper images, which were supplied in all ATI's new products, such as Rage128 and RADEON, were really far from ideal. Moreover, they were even not up to the minimal requirements.

All the things mentioned above are true for ATI graphics cards used in 3ds max application as well. Since professional applications are much more sensitive to the drivers quality than the gaming ones, the use of ATI graphics cards such as Rage128 and RADEON in 3ds max could disappoint any ATI fan for a pretty long time since they first appeared in the market. We remember pretty well that when we first got hold of the new RADEON256 some time ago, we were really anxious to see what it was capable of in 3ds max. having installed the drivers and adjusted all the settings, we started one of our benchmark scenes and… we didn't see anything besides the reference frame. In other words, the drivers supplied with this graphics card couldn't display anything at all from the relatively simple scene. And this was the OpenGL mode! Not to mention Direct3D, because the drivers of all graphics cards work slower and "less correct" in Direct3D mode than in OpenGL, and most professional graphics cards are not accompanied by any Direct3D drivers at all. Later on, in about half a year after the RADEON launch, ATI representatives claimed that their software developers were working on the drivers specifically for 3ds max. After that we carried out a number of tests where the new RADEON with "superoptimized" drivers was completely defeated by GeForce2 GTS with "regular" drivers.

That is why we actually didn't expect any positive results from ATI's newcomer: RADEON 8500. However, when we tested it in 3ds max, we were pleasantly surprised by… Anyway, let's start from the very beginning :)

What is the difference between RADEON 8500 and GeForce3 graphics processors and the graphics cards based on them from the point of view of a 3ds max user? Both graphics cards feature the same number of pipelines and texturing units, though it doesn't play any important role during the work in viewports. RADEON boasts a more advanced texture caching technology, however, in 3ds max viewports the textures are transformed into schematic "miniatures", so "better" caching is very unlikely to improve the overall performance. this way, the only factor, which can tell on the performance in 3ds max is the graphics processor working frequency, which makes 240MHz by GeForce3 and 275MHz by RADEON 8500.

However, these calculations make sense if the drivers of the graphics cards are more or less of the same quality. This article will show us how correct is the OpenGL driver for RADEON and what influence it has on the performance and image quality in 3ds max. In other words, this article will focus not on the hardware advantages of the RADEON 8500 and GeForce3 Ti500 graphics solutions. It would be more correct to say that we will try to figure out if ATI software developers managed to create good, worthy drivers.

Image Quality

The term "image quality" applied to a non anti-aliased images in 3ds max viewports means something like that: does the graphics card display everything and is everything displayed correctly? It means that the cards can see the viewport scene correctly or not quite. This way, it would be erroneous to say that one graphics card boasts better viewports image quality than another one. At present almost all the gaming graphics cards as well as all professional graphics cards display the viewports images equally correct. If the images by some of them are not free from certain artifacts, then it would be more correct to say that this graphics card displays the viewport images with greater or smaller artifacts than another one.

Despite all our expectations, RADEON 8500 showed impeccable image quality in all the benchmarks listed below as well as in some other scenes aimed at checking if the image is displayed correctly. That is why we would say: RADEON 8500 does display the viewport images correctly. In this respect we don't think it would make sense offering you the whole bunch of absolutely identical screenshots here taken for RADEON 8500 and GeForce3 Ti500.

However, image quality may be better or worse for anti-aliased viewports. As we know, there is only one type of anti-aliasing available in 3ds max settings: anti-aliased lines in wireframe viewports, which can be enabled by selecting a corresponding function in OpenGL drivers:

And since anti-aliasing always makes the lines thicker, we can see thicker or thinner anti-aliased lines depending on the implementation of this function in the graphics cards driver:

NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 500 Anti-ALiasing
      

ATI RADEON 8500 Anti-ALiasing
      

Of course, the thinner is the anti-aliased line, the better, as we saw in the scene above. If there are many lines in the scene, they start covering other objects this way main the overall scene perception and work with it very difficult. That is why we would say that the quality of the anti-aliased images in viewports provided by RADEON 8500 is better than that provided by GeForce3 Ti500.

Besides the lines anti-aliasing described above, the today's gaming graphics cards can effect full-scene anti-aliasing without losing any performance. However, this anti-aliasing is hardly worth a penny compared with the lines anti-aliasing, because it is absolutely useless to apply anti-aliasing to textures: they are represented by very schematic miniatures, which do not become any better even if anti-aliased.

All in all, finishing with anti-aliasing we would like to point out that all our friends working as designers, never enable anti-aliasing, because the anti-aliased lines are thicker and spoil the view lowering the resolution in a way. That is why you'd rather pay not too much attention to improving image quality on your RADEON 8500 by enabling anti-aliasing, especially if you never use it.

Testbed and Methods

To test the graphics cards performance we used the same benchmarks as in the previous reviews. We would like to remind you once again that these benchmarks are recommended for 3ds max tests by the application developer. This time we decided not to make a separate page devoted to the benchmarks description, but to locate them one after another together with the actual testing results. As usual, we offer the results obtained without and with anti-aliasing. Surely, the results with anti-aliasing were obtained only when it made sense, i.e. 3ds max can apply anti-aliasing only in Wireframe mode. In all other viewports modes anti-aliasing doesn't tell on the image quality or the fps rate in any way.

Here is our testbed configuration:

• 2 Pentium 1133MHz CPUs with 512KB Cache;
• Iwill DVD266U mainboard;
• 1024MB PC2100 DDR SDRAM;
• VisionTek GeForce3 Ti500 and ATI RADEON 8500 graphics cards;
• 20GB IBM DTLA 7200rpm HDD.

We used the following software:

• Windows 2000 SP2;
• 3ds max 4 (OpenGL rendering), 1024x768 32bit.

For our graphics cards we installed the following drivers:

• RADEON 8500: ver. 2.16 691;
• GeForce3: Detonator XP ver. 21.83.

At present the best drivers for RADEON 8500 are the official ones, but not certified by Microsoft, i.e. version 2.16.691. Certified drivers show a bit slower performance, and numerous "amateur" drivers available on fan sites are optimized for some particular games at the expense of all the other applications thus proving very slow in 3ds max.

The last official drivers from NVIDIA, DetonatorXP 23.11 showed slightly lower performance in 3ds max than the "last but one" official driver set version 21.83. That is why we decided to test our GeForce3 Ti500 with the last but one driver. As for the "amateur" drivers for GeForce3 Ti500, we didn't take then into consideration here.

Performance

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 in Wireframe Views. 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 28 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

During simultaneous animation in all the four viewports, the CPU is loaded really heavily, so that the difference in the graphics cards performance is eliminated completely. GeForce3 Ti500 and RADEON 8500 are similar to one another and the working frequencies differ not that drastically (240MHz and 275MHz), that is why both solutions performed equally fast here.

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

This benchmark doesn't load the CPU and the GPU at all and shows the speed and "correctness" of the displayed objects crossing one another along the Z-axis in the viewports (this is where the really impressive fps rates come from). In case of incorrect realization of the objects overlapping in the drivers or on the hardware level, this animation speed drops down to 10-20fps. In our case, however, both graphics cards successfully stood the test.

Moreover, as a "side effect" this benchmark shows if the card works with AGP correctly. We made this conclusion having measured the performance of GeForce3 Ti500 in Dual Socket370 platform used in this session and in Dual Socket A platform. As a result, Dual Socket370 platform reached three times as high fps rate as the dual Socket A one.

So, you can see very clearly that the AGP implementation is traditionally better and more correct by NVIDIA's solution.

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

Like the previous benchmark, this one shows how fast the graphics card works with AGP. Here we see that RADEON 8500 appeared even worse: in the previous test the ratio between the results shown by RADEON 8500 and GeForce3 Ti500 made 1:2. Now this ratio turned into 1:6!

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

As we can see, RADEON 8500 hardly coped with the geometry in this benchmark at all. Let's see what will happen in the next benchmark also dealing with complex geometry.

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

Despite our expectations in the benchmark with twice as complex geometry, RADEON 8500 didn't perform that awfully badly as in the previous case. No doubt, the drivers are still quite "raw", especially bearing in mind that RADEON 8500 boasts a considerably more powerful geometric unit than GeForce3. All in all, we witness a total failure of RADEON 8500 in geometric benchmarks. Let's have a look at the lighting benchmarks now.

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

In Lighting benchmarks both graphics cards ran very close to one another: almost equally fast. So, we can conclude that the drivers for RADEON 8500 are more or less "correct" and finalized as far as light sources support goes.