Performance

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.

Matrox graphics card is traditionally behind RADEON 9700 Pro and GeForce4 Ti4600, but this time the mentioned performance difference is almost twice as big. Quadro4 again performs beautifully fast due to proper driver optimization.

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.

Here the outsider appeared RADEON 9700 Pro. It most probably owes its failure to not finalized drivers. Quadro4 proved the best as usual.

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.

Although in this test the graphics cards didn't boast any hundreds of fps, Matrox Parhelia again fell twice as far behind.

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.

The gaming graphics cards coped with this task equally well. Summing up the results of the texturing tests we can conclude that the drivers of all the testing participants feature equally good implementation of the texture processing. However, as soon as texturing appears not the only task, and there is also geometry that needs processing, Matrox Parhelia's performance slows down significantly.

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.

What do we see here? Firstly, as soon as we shift to proper transparency from the "simple" one, the performance drops down by about 50%. Secondly, the gaming graphics cards show very diverse results, so that the leader appears almost twice as fast as the outsider. This can be explained only by the driver quality, and not by the different working frequencies.

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.

The wireframe mode is never used in games, that is why the results our testing participants showed in it is 90% determined by the driver quality: NV25 provided with specific drivers optimized for wireframe modes, which we al know a sQuadro4, appeared 4 times as fast as the same NV25 based solution featuring gaming drivers.

Benchmark 13

This is the Benchmark 3 scene in wireframe mode:

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

The graphics cards perform as fast as in the previous case. GeForce4 copes with the processing of massive geometry in wireframe modes best of all the gaming solutions tested. Although professional graphics cards boasting optimized drivers nevertheless turn much faster than their gaming fellows.

Conclusion

For years NVIDIA graphics cards have been proving quite successful in 3D Studio MAX/3ds max viewports. Even in the times of 3D Studio MAX 2.0 when ATI RADEON graphics card with the first driver versions hitting the market then couldn't display anything in the viewports of this software package, the competing solution from NVIDIA, GeForce2 GTS performed brilliantly against its background. It not only displayed the scenes quite correctly for any viewport settings, but also outperformed the professional graphics solutions of those times, which were developing too slowly.

And today, when this famous 3D modeling software package has been renamed to 3ds max, the best result still belong to NVIDIA. NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600, which is now definitely the best solution for work in viewports for this money. On the other hand, it is really nice to see that the competitors can already offer solutions, which work correctly in 3ds max even with the very first driver versions. If it goes on like that, we dare suppose that NVIDIA's positions will be threatened by some pretty powerful competitors one day.