T&L and Vertex Shaders

At first let’s check the high Polygon Count test from 3DMark2001 SE package:

“cut-down” vertex shaders of the new NVIDIA chips show much lower results than NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. So, despite higher working frequencies NV31 and NV34 get completely defeated by GeForce4 Ti4200-8x and ATI RADEON 9500 Pro even during Fixed Function T&L processing.

With DirectX8 vertex shaders the situation is just the same: this time the newcomers were beaten even by ATI RADEON 9000 Pro.

The results remained the same even with DirectX9 vertex shaders.

So, let’s try to draw some preliminary conclusions basing on the results in synthetic benchmarks.

First, it is evident that the difference between NV31 and NV34 is not only in clock frequencies and size of texturing, vertex and other caches. GeForce FX 5600/5600 Ultra, just like GeForce FX 5200/5200 Ultra inherited NV30 architecture, but at the same time acquired a few important improvements implying faster pixel shaders processing as well as fully-fledged flexible support of the work modes with two or four pixel “pipelines”.

Besides that, NV31 is the only one of the two NV30 successors that retained the frame buffer compression during FSAA, while NV34 received the older implementation of anti-aliasing used in NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti family.

And finally, the vertex shaders performance of NVIDIA GeForce FX 5600/5600 Ultra and 5200/5200 Ultra appeared much lower than by NVIDIA GeForce FX 5800 Ultra.

By the way, when ATI Company designed their “cut-down” RADEON 9500/9500 pro chips, they simply reduced the number of pixel pipelines, having left the number of vertex processors unchanged.

Well, the most exciting part of our review comes now. We will be evaluating the performance and image quality provided by the new NVIDIA solutions with full-screen anti-aliasing and in games.