Pixel Shaders

To test the pixel shaders performance we resorted to benchmarks from 3DMark2001 and 3DMArk2003 test sets:

The results of NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200/5200 Ultra are not so optimistic: GeForce4 Ti4200-8x and ATI RADEON 9500 Pro managed to outperform them. It looks as if the pixel shaders implementation and integer calculations by NV34 remained absolutely the same as by NV30.

However, the “eldest” newcomer, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra proved impressively fast here, having left NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra far behind and almost caught up with the 8-pipeline ATI RADEON 9500 Pro. Well, the integer part of the NV31 pixel shaders seems to have got significantly improved since the times of NV30.

In case of a more complex pixel shader, new NVIDIA chips give in: GeForce4 Ti4200-8x and ATI RADEON 9000 Pro surpass them quite significantly. Not to mention ATI RADEON 9500 Pro...

In case of floating point DirectX9 pixel shader ATI RADEON 9500 Pro appears far ahead of the new GeForce FX solutions. Nevertheless, NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600 Ultra proves almost twice as fast as GeForce FX 5200 Ultra.