X-bit labs

First in DirectX 10.1: ATI Radeon HD 3850/3870 (page 18)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 01/25/2008 | 10:31 AM ]

Other Synthetic Benchmarks

The Shader Particles test shows how efficiently the physical model of a particle system is processed using pixel shaders. The model is visualized using vertex texturing.

The ATI Radeon HD 3800 series is surprisingly slow. Perhaps they feel the lack of memory bandwidth because the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, which is inferior to the GeForce 8800 GTX in this respect, behaves that way, too.

The Perlin Noise is a complex test using a shader with 447 mathematics instructions and 48 texture lookups. Thus, it is a good test of the overall efficiency of the given GPU.

The ATI Radeon HD 3870 as about as good as the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT at mathematical computations and texturing. These cards have identical results. The ATI Radeon HD 3850 has a lower core frequency, yet keeps on the same level with the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX.

The results of the ATI Radeon HD 3870 series in synthetic tests provoke no questions except for complex vertex shaders, which may be due to architectural differences between the RV670 and R600 or to the specifics of the Complex Vertex Shader test from 3DMark06. We expect the ATI Radeon HD 3870 and Radeon HD 2900 XT to be roughly equal in real-life applications, the former having an advantage where a really high memory bandwidth is required and the performance is not limited by other factors. Let’s see if our supposition is true now.