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

As we see, the results are almost identical. These results were obtained for 128x128 pixel miniatures. After that I thought that AGP 8x might reveal its advantages once the miniature size gets bigger, that is why I increased the miniature size up to the allowed maximum of 2048x2048 and ran Benchmark 9. Here are the results obtained:

This is again a complete similarity. After that I again ran all the texture benchmarks with all the miniature settings up to the maximum, and in all cases without any exceptions I got the same results. Well, there is only one conclusion that I could draw here: AGP 8x doesn't offer us any advantages over the previous interface so far.