Performance

Benchmark 9: Rasterization Visualization Test

The ninth benchmark is a scene with 1 light source and very simple geometry, including only 4500 polygons, which occupies the entire viewport. It is aimed at testing the rasterizing speed in Smooth+ Highlights.

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

RADEON 8500 is falling about 10% behind its rival because of the drivers, since the hardware part of it doesn't yield even a tiny bit to GeForce3 Ti500 in terms of fillrate.

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

In texture benchmarks ATI solutions have always been very successful: even RADEON 256 took the lead in this benchmark though in all the rest it proved a total failure. Therefore, a slight advantage of RADEON 8500 is quite natural, especially keeping in mind a nearly the same difference in chip working frequency of RADEON 8500 and GeForce3 Ti500 (as we all know, the working frequency appears a determinative once the drivers are equally correct and the hardware architecture is similar).

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

Here, RADEON 8500 dashed forward in all possible meanings of this word :) leaving GeForce3 behind. The almost twice the advantage of RADEON 8500 is absolutely untypical for 3ds max. We would also like to point out that in this benchmark the camera is rotating inside the object, i.e. the geometry is not deformed or moved anywhere. In fact, this benchmark shows the graphics cards performance in the most frequent conditions: turning and zooming the scene in viewports.

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

As for the texture correction performed simultaneously with the deformation of geometry this texture is laid over, RADEON didn't cope with this task as well as with the previous one. These are unoptimized drivers, which are to blame for RADEON's lagging behind in geometric benchmarks.

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

This benchmark uses the same scene as the first geometric benchmark. However, this geometry is represented in Wireframe mode, and not in Smooth + Highlight. And as we can see, in Wireframe mode RADEON 8500 performed just excellently!

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

In this Wireframe mode RADEON 8500 proved the winner again.

Benchmark 15: Complex Shading Visualization Test

The same scene in Smooth + Highlights mode:

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

This scene features moderate geometry and maximum light sources. And again RADEON 8500 appears No. 1. we would like to remind you once again that the last two benchmarks emulate the user's work in a typical 3ds max scene that is why they are the most valuable of all.

Conclusion

Let's sum up all the results in a single table for your convenience:

So, we see that in geometric benchmarks RADEON 8500 suffered a total defeat because of the "improper" drivers. Moreover, the AGP implementation also leaves much to be desired. However, all the other benchmarks showed that it nearly as fast as GeForce3 Ti500, and in the final benchmarks RADEON 8500 proves an indisputable leader. This way, we have every reason to make a very natural conclusion: ATI engineers have finally learned :) to design the GPU, i.e. "pure hardware". Now everything depends on software developers. They managed to make good drivers for RADEON256 only half a year after the graphics cards based on it appeared in the mass market. And RADEON 8500 came out with the already more or less acceptable software. So, undoubtedly after another half a year passes, you will never ask yourself a question what to take for work in 3ds max. However, we would like to warn you against unofficial drivers: these drivers are usually optimized for a very limited number of gaming applications at the expense of all the other ones. At least RADEON 8500 working with any of the today's unofficial drivers performs much slower than in case it works with the official ones.

If you ask us, which of the two graphics cards tested we could recommend for use in 3ds max, we wouldn't give you any definite answer. In this case you'd better take into account your personal preferences and of course, bear in mind that ATI RADEON 8500 graphics cards (but not cards on RADEON 8500 from third manufacturers) provide much better 2D image quality than GeForce3 based solutions even coming from well-known brand named companies.