Test Results: 3DMark2001

Game 1 - Car Chase

This test includes a special system aka Ipion from Havok, which calculates physics in real time. This makes the benchmark maximally close to real gaming conditions, as to the 3DMark2001 developers. The graphics accelerator in this test is also loaded to the full extent: the average scene of this game has about 37.7 thousand polygons and about 8.8MB/17.7MB of textures in 16bit/32bit modes with the low level of detail correspondingly. As for the high level of detail, there are 12.8MB/22.9MB of textures in 16bit/32bit modes. In case of High Detail, the scene includes more objects of higher complexity and all the moving objects also have shadows, which are calculated with the help of vertex shaders. Besides, the landscape is covered with the third texture layer and all the stepping bots acquired searchlights and two flying bots-assistants.

In case of Low Detail GeForce3 falls a bit behind GeForce2 Ultra only in 16bit mode because the scene is full of different objects while the textures aren't that numerous. GeForce2 Ultra core works at a higher clock frequency than that of GeForce3 that's why GeForce2 Ultra processes the polygons somewhat faster than its elder brother. At the same time the performance gain provided by the HSR in 16bit mode isn't big enough to bring GeForce3 the winner's laurels.

In 32bit color depth mode the things change. GeForce3 can now be found a significant while ahead of GeForce2 Ultra because the situation requires more from the memory bus bandwidth and due to HSR and memory optimization GeForce3 manages to dash forward even though it processes the polygons somewhat slower. This is especially noticeable at higher resolutions.

In High Detail, the textures size increases, besides, the amount of polygons almost doubles. As is known, GeForce and GeForce2 chips can save the vertexes in their local graphics memory, however they never do it and transfer the data via AGP bus in order to free the local graphics memory bus for some other purposes, such as transferring textures, etc. That is why the cards performance in this test is additionally limited by the data transfer rate via AGP bus. Another factor that slightly lowers the results of GeForce2 is the necessity to lay three textures over the ground surface, which forces GeForce2 based graphics cards to undertake 2 passes, while RADEON, which can lay 3 textures per clock, and GeForce3, which can lay 4 textures per 2 clocks, manage that within a single pass.

Game 2 - Dragothic

This test shows a dragon flying over the village, which may be an imitation of the future role games.

There are a bit more textures and polygons in this test compared to Car Chase. A lot of houses in the village make the OverDraw quite high. Dragon and villagers animation as well as shadows transformations are implemented via Vertex Shaders. The scene played in the Low Detail mode features about 51.4 thousand polygons, which makes 8.8MB of textures for 16bit and 17.2MB for 32bit color depth. For High Detail mode the number of polygons rises up to 99.7 thousand and the textures size to 13.2MB for 16bit and 25.8MB for 32bit color depth.

With the low level of detail set GeForce3 leads the race due to high OverDraw value and hence to efficient HSR and Z-buffer compression.

In case of high level of detail, the village is larger and there are 3 textures laid over each house in this village. The dragon is shown as a whole and there appear three awfully badly drawn village guards with bows and arrows, who can't hit the dragon from a 20-meter distance.

Here GeForce3 and RADEON DDR appear the leaders, which is quite understandable since the scene has a huge OverDraw. Besides, the village houses are all made of three textures each, which makes the cards on NVIDIA GeForce2 draw them in two passes. Well, and all the stuff we have just said about the AGP bus bandwidth in Car Chase turns out valid here as well. In general, the graphics cards proved a bit faster here than in Car Chase. This is probably caused by the fact that no physics is calculated in real time here and as a result, the CPU workload drops down.

Game 3 - Lobby

This gaming scene has been initially intended for demo only, however the developers considered it realistic enough to be used as a test. The floor and the walls of the lobby are covered with two textures and all the characters - with one texture. In High Detail mode the action is reflected on the floor, which is achieved due to the scene mirroring. All the characters have dynamic shadows created with the "rendering to textures" method. Note that the shadows polygons are transformed with the help of Vertex Shaders, and if the graphics card doesn't support Vertex Shaders, then it is the CPU, which makes all the necessary calculations. Also in High Detail mode the bullets leave marks on the walls of the lobby. On the average there are 21.7 thousand polygons in the low detail scene, which makes 4.1MB and 8.2MB for 16bit and 32bit modes correspondingly. The high detail scene includes 41.7 thousand polygons, which makes 6MB and 10.3MB of textures in 16bit and 32bit modes correspondingly.

Well, the result is quite logical: GeForce3 is in the leading position in 16bit and 32bit modes due to HSR, Z-buffer compression and graphics memory optimization.

Game 4 - Nature

 

 

This scene shows the image quality that could be obtained if the hardware opportunities provided by DirectX8-compliant graphics cards were used to the full extent. Here Vertex Shaders are used to create grass, leaves, trees, butterflies, moving fisherman.

The lake surface is drawn with the help of per-pixel reflection and cube environment mapping in 4 texturing stages, which is equivalent to laying 4 textures. Of course, the cards, which don't support Pixel Shaders, failed this test that's why here we tested only GeForce3. The average amount of polygons in the scene is equal to 21.7 thousand. As for the textures, there are 4.1MB in 16bit mode and 8.2MB in 32bit mode.

Fillrate

This synthetic benchmark measures the fillrate of your graphics hardware. Fillrate is a measurement of how fast the graphics card is capable of drawing textures onto 3D objects. There are two different test runs included in the fillrate test, and they are:

1. Single-texturing: There are 64 surfaces with one texture each. This means that the graphics hardware fill each of these objects separately, no matter how many texture layers that card is capable of drawing in a single pass.
2. Multi-texturing: We draw 64 texture layers as fast as possible. 64 texture layers are distributed so that each surface in use has as many texture layers as that particular card can draw in a single pass. For example, if your card can draw 8 texture layers in a single pass, then there will be 8 objects with 8 texture layers each. If your card is capable of doing 6 texture layers in a pass, there will be 10 objects with 6 layers and an 11th object with the remaining 4 layers.

In 16bit modes in case of single-texturing the fillrates of GeForce2 and GeForce3 are almost equal. In all other modes GeForce3 features higher real fillrate. It is interesting that in multi-texturing, RADEON shows higher results than GeForce2 Ultra, which makes us suspect that the benchmark contains a bug. Especially since ATI RADEON 64MB DDR VIVO features the theoretical texel fillrate of 183x2x3=1098Mtexels/sec, while the theoretical texel fillrate of GeForce2 Ultra makes 250x4x2=2000Mtexels/sec. On the other hand, we can suppose that Z-buffer compression and texture caches of GeForce3 and RADEON allow using the memory bus more efficiently.

High Polygon Count

This synthetic test measures the polygon throughput of the graphics card. There are over one million polygons in this scene. There are two test runs in this benchmark. The objects in the scene aren't textured and are lit by a single directional light. In the second run, there are 8 lights all in all; one directional and 7 point lights.

As you can see the polygon throughput of GeForce3 T&L unit is almost the same as that of GeForce2. It means that if the polygons are processed as fast as by GeForce2, GeForce3's T&L unit differs from GeForce2's one only by "being smarter" due to Vertex Shaders support.

Vertex Shaders

This benchmark demonstrates a great lot of moving characters, which are all alike. Their animation is set by the Vertex Shader. If the Vertex Shaders aren't supported by the graphics card, they can be efficiently emulated in software with the help of the system CPU.

The most interesting thing is that Vertex Shaders emulation on those graphics cards, which do not support them, appeared faster than their hardware implementation on GeForce3. In fact, this is quite understandable. If we assume that the characters' movements are defined with a few key issues, and the intermediate stages are interpolated by the Vertex Shader, then Athlon 1.2GHz will undoubtedly do this interpolation much faster than GeForce3 core. Besides, the models transformation (when their coordinates are already calculated) by GeForce3 is carried out as fast as by GeForce2, because both graphics chips transform the polygons at the same speed.

Test Results: Aquanox

This is just a test demo version of the game, which is expected to be finalized in Q3 2001. What we've got now, is just a gaming engine. The action takes place in 2666 under water, in a gigantic deep sea city, which appears the center of a conflict. The scene is rich in polygons since all the object models are pretty complex: the suboceanic world and the sea bed relief are impressively detailed. The developers used here Pixel Shaders v.1.1 and Vertex Shaders v.1.0. Moreover, they claim that this gaming engine is optimized for GeForce3.

The test in Aquamark, the benchmark built into the Aquanox demo, was carried out with all default settings:

Well, GeForce3 is an indisputable leader here. However, when testing we didn't notice any visual differences between the image quality provided by GeForce2 and that provided by GeForce3. But if you take a look at the diagram above, you will see that GeForce2 is quite a while behind. We suppose that the floating fog effect is exactly the thing that slows down its performance, because it is very likely to be created with the help of the Vertex Shader. Maybe some effects, which are supported on the hardware level by GeForce3, have to be emulated by GeForce2. Anyway, Aquanox developers do not reveal any details of their offspring that's why we have to guess what it could be…

Conclusion

Well, GeForce3 turned out quite a finished product intended not only for the games of the nearest future, but also providing a real performance increase in the today's games. Since most contemporary games do not use High-Order pixel and vertex shaders that much or don't use them at all, we have to be patient because we will be able to see the advantages of these hardware innovations only in the future.

It is extremely pleasing that we will be able to get more beautiful images and to retain high performance of the graphics accelerator due to well-balanced architecture, new fast and high-quality full-scene anti-aliasing methods, possibility to enable anisotropic filtering.

And the most important thing. In order to balance GeForce3's architecture properly, NVIDIA engineers used caching and all sorts of optimization, which prevents GeForce3 based graphics cards from getting slowed down by the insufficient memory bus bandwidth.

Highs:

• Multisampling anti-aliasing provides fast and high quality effect. We haven't seen such impeccable image quality before.
• Though 32-sample anisotropic filtering results into significant performance drops, we can always choose between fastness and image quality.
• High performance in 32bit mode.
• Pixel and Vertex Shaders support. Now it is possible to create all sorts of fantastic materials, effects and scenes. No matter that the real application for these technologies may appear only tomorrow. We can have patience and wait :-)
• Well-balanced architecture. If there appear low-cost "noname" solutions on the same chipset with lower working frequencies, they won't fall too greatly behind the brand name cards.

Lows:

• Not high performance in 16bit mode.
• Price. GeForce3 is positioned as a High-End gaming solution that is why its price is beyond all reasonable limits, especially since there are no worthy competitors to it currently.