Geometry Performance

In this test Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 family doesn’t act logically at all: it yielded not only to ATI Radeon HD 4800, but even to its predecessor - Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX! The only explanation we could come up with – lower clock frequencies resulting from extreme complexity of the new G200 chip, which do not get compensated by increased computational capacity. It could be a software issue at best, but in the worst case these results may indicate the presence of some architectural issues. No good news for the newcomers.

Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 behaves exactly the same way in the vertex shaders processing test. Both models turn out in the last places. However, these are theoretical tests, and in real games things may be different.

Even if we disregard the fact that Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 won in 3DMark Vantage thanks to idling of 4/5 of ATI Radeon HD 4800’s computational capacity, we will still notice that the improvement is minimal even compared to Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX. The results demonstrated by Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 show it best of all.

X-bit Mark geometry benchmark doesn’t hold back ATI Radeon HD 4800 and the cards on RV770 GPU get far ahead. The gap between the leaders and Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 reduces in scenes with 8 light sources, although ATI cards remain ahead. Moreover, new Nvidia graphics cards perform less efficiently than their predecessor, Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX, and even bigger number of shader processors doesn’t help.

All this once again proves that new Nvidia solutions have certain problems with geometry processing. As we have already said, these problems may be caused by lower clock frequencies of the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 280/260 solutions. However, frequencies only couldn’t possibly cause such a dramatic failure.

Overall, Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 family cannot boast much in geometry benchmarks. In most cases G200 demonstrated considerably lower potential than ATI RV770 GPU, even despite gigantic chip size and unprecedented amount of transistors used. New Nvidia GPU is evidently not so well-balanced: with the die size approaching 600sq.mm G200 features extremely large texturing and raster blocks at the expense of computational capacity. Only the results obtained in real gaming applications will be able to rehabilitate the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 solutions.