X-bit labs

Highly Defined: ATI Radeon HD 2000 Architecture Review (page 21)

Category: Video

by Anton Shilov , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Alexey Stepin

[ 05/15/2007 | 07:34 AM ]

Other Theoretical Tests

The “Shaders Particles” test helps to measure the efficiency of processing the physical model of a system of particles by means of pixel shaders and of its visualization with vertex texturing. Previous generation hardware from ATI did not support vertex texture fetches, whereas the new one, obviously, supports this feature without problems.

But even though results of the Radeon HD 2900 XT here are pretty high, the chip does not outperform Nvidia’s flagship offering.

In the “Perlin Noise” test the realistic clouds that are changing in real time are generated by means of a pixel shader that contains 447 mathematic instructions and 48 texture lookups. So, this test shows how well the GPU can work with long shaders (the Shader Model 3.0 specification requires support for 512-intruction-long shaders).

Just according to expectations, Radeon HD 2900 XT managed to find itself on the first place in this test: with mathematic instructions exceeding the amount of texture lookups by the factor of 10, the R600 architecture feels itself very good here.