Pixel Shader Performance

To check out the performance of the new graphics processor with pixel shaders we ran four programs: Marko Dolenc’s Fillrate Tester, Xbitmark, 3DMark2001 SE and 3DMark03. Here are the results of their running:

The RADEON X700 XT behaves just like a GPU with its specifications should do – slower than the RADEON X800, but faster than the RADEON 9800 XT. In three cases out of four the ratio of the results of the RADEON X700 XT to the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT roughly corresponds to the ratio of the clock rates of the two graphics processors. Only using the half precision the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT gains a heftier advantage over the competitor (The RADEON X700 XT is always using the 24-bit precision and cannot get any speedup from enabling 16-bit precision in pixel shaders).

Nothing new happens as we disable Z writes: the showings of the RADEON X700 XT and the others remain practically the same.

The GeForce 6600 GT accelerates rapidly as we disable color writes. That’s quite predictable, though.

Next goes our exclusive Xbitmark:

The RADEON X700 XT is advancing confidently through this test, especially processing complex shaders like Dot Product Bump Mapping + Specular + Reflection and Wood. It lost, however, to the GeForce 6600 GT in shaders that actively use textures, and this is yet another proof that the RADEON X700 XT has a low texturing efficiency.

The RADEON X700 XT is slightly better than the GeForce 6600 GT in this test as you see in 1024x768 and 1600x1200 resolutions. Well, it is rather the memory bandwidth than the speed of executing version 1.1 pixel shaders that limits the results here.

This scene uses version 1.4 shaders, and the X700 XT is noticeably slower than the GeForce 6600 GT, and just slightly slower than the top-end card of the last generation, the RADEON 9800 XT.

The RADEON X700 XT has average results executing version 2.0 pixel shaders: faster than the RADEON 9800 XT but slower than the GeForce 6600 GT. This quite well agrees with the results we got in Xbitmark.