Make Home Page
Add to Favorites
Print article
Send link to friend
Digg this
Post to del.icio.us
Post to Slashdot
RV360 and NV36: What’s New? Part III: Comparison
So, what new things are now available to us with the arrival of the new mainstream graphics processors? You can easily find the answer in the following table:
VGA Adapter | ATI Radeon 9600 PRO | ATI Radeon 9600 XT | NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra | NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700 Ultra |
Graphics chip | RV350 | RV360 | NV31 | NV36 |
Production technology | 0.13micron | 0.13micron | 0.13micron | 0.13micron |
Transistors | ~75 mln | ~75 mln | ~80 mln | ~82 mln |
Memory bus | 128bit DDR | 128bit DDR | 128bit DDR | 128bit DDR-II |
Fillrate, GPixel/s | 1.6 | 2 | 1.6 | 1.9 |
Vertex processing speed, mln vertexes/s. | 200 | 250 | 100 | 356 |
AGP modes | 4x/8x | 4x/8x | 4x/8x | 4x/8x |
Graphics chip frequency | 400MHz | 500MHz | 400MHz | 475MHz |
Memory frequency | 600MHz DDR | 600MHz DDR | 800MHz DDR | 900MHz DDR |
Pipelines/TMU | 4x1 | 4x1 | 4x1/2x2 | 4x1/2x2 |
Pixel shaders version / vertex shaders version | 2.0/2.0 | 2.0/2.0 | 2.0+/2.0+ | 2.0+/2.0+ |
Max. FSAA mode Multisampled/Mixed | 6x | 6x | 4x/8x | 4x/8x |
Max. Anisotropic filtering mode | 16x | 16x | 8x | 8x |
Supported technologies | Hyper Z III+, SmartShader 2.0, SmoothVision 2.1 | Hyper Z III+, SmartShader 2.0, SmoothVision 2.1 | IntelliSample, CineFX | IntelliSample, CineFX 2.0 |
Number of RAMDACs/ RAMDAC frequency | 2x400MHz | 2x400MHz | 2x400MHz | 2x400MHz |
TMDS | yes | yes | yes | yes |
TV-Out support | yes | yes | yes | yes |
The NV36 evidently makes a farther step away from its predecessor with its three times higher vertex processing speed and the boosted-up GPU and memory frequencies. Will it be enough to win the race?
Testbed and Methods
As usual, we benchmarked the new GPUs and the respective cards based on them in a variety of synthetic and real tests. The testbed was configured as follows:
- AMD Athlon XP 3200+ “Barton” CPU (2.2GHz, 400MHz FSB);
- ABIT NF7-S mainboard v.2.0;
- 2x256MB Corsair XMS3200 DDR SDRAM (2-3-3-6 timings, 400MHz);
- Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X (2mb buffer) HDD, 40GB capacity;
- NVIDIA MCP-T audio;
- Microsoft Windows XP SP1;
- Drivers: ATI Catalyst 3.8, NVIDIA ForceWare 52.16.
The new driver from NVIDIA, ForceWare 52.16, needs a bit of description. This is the first version of the driver in which “optimization” of the shader code is officially implemented. That is, NVIDIA added a translator into the ForceWare, which transforms a portion of DirectX 9 code into a form the GeForce FX processor can easier digest. This is done “on the fly”, of course.
The reason is obvious. NVIDIA had to boost the performance somehow, seeing that many PC users are not satisfied with shader-processing speed of its GPUs. It seems like the GeForce FX architecture demands a thorough re-design to reach the same level of performance the GPUs from ATI Technologies now offer. So far, NVIDIA can only rely on software optimizations. Before proceeding to the benchmarks, I would also like to expose a few ideas concerning benchmarking in general.
