Performance in ShaderMark 2.0

We cannot pass by the topic of pixel shaders since there appear ever more games using them. To find out which GPU is better at executing shader programs, we used a small but very easy-to-use benchmarking suite, ShaderMark 2.0. It is drawing pixel shaders, differing in beauty and complexity.

Unfortunately, this test doesn’t agree that NVIDIA’s GPUs are fully compatible with the DirectX 9 specification, giving out a message that some shaders could not be executed because of the GPU limitations. We initially thought the error to occur because of some issues with the Unified Compiler implemented into the latest ForceWare 52.16, but the reason appeared to be totally different.

According to Thomas Bruckschlegel from Tommti-Systems – the developers of ShaderMark, NVIDIA’s GeForce FX-series does not support floating point textures and render targets under DirectX 9. Even though one of the company’s Developer Relations officers said that NVIDIA would add support for these capabilities into “future drivers”, floating point textures and render targets still do not function under DirectX 9. Nevertheless, we offer you the full list of results in ShaderMark 2.0:”

You see the winner – ATI Technologies with its RADEON 9600 PRO and XT. There are two things to note about the results. First, the RADEON 9600 XT clocked at 500MHz shows the advantage of its extra frequency in the way of a neat performance gain over the 400MHz RADEON 9600 PRO. Second, the GeForce FX 5700 Ultra is about two times faster in this test than the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra. I guess we should acknowledge the work done by the NVIDIA engineers. However, the inherent drawbacks of the GeForce FX architecture cannot be easily fixed. The new GeForce is still slower than the new RADEON as far as shaders are concerned.

Winding up the theoretical part of this review, with its synthetic benchmarks, I should say that ATI’s RV360 is definitely better so far. It wins in nearly every test, save for the geometry-heavy ones where NVIDIA’s GPUs are traditionally strong. The RADEON 9600 XT is most impressive in pixel shader benchmarks where it simply has no rivals. As for the NV31, it is surely an out-dated product, now that the much faster NV36 is available.

The performance of the NV36 is quite high, especially in geometry-rich tests and in high resolutions (fast memory!). On the other hand, it is still slow at executing pixel shaders, despite of the optimizations in the new ForceWare driver.

Still, I think you don’t care as much about synthetic benchmarks as about real applications – the games you play today. We have benchmarked the new GPUs in several modern computer games.