X-bit labs

S3 GammaChrome S18 Pro Graphics Adapter Review (page 5)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 04/19/2005 | 07:19 PM ]

Texturing Speed

The widely known Marko Dolenc’s Fillrate Tester helped us measure the scene fill rate parameter.

The measurements of the fill rate with enabled color and Z-value writes hint at high efficiency of the GammaChrome GPU, particularly its caches and memory subsystem. The GammaChrome’s fill rate diminishes almost like the RADEON X600 PRO’s as there are more textures to be mapped, but the S3 card is anyway a little better. This outcome may be due to more efficient pixel pipelines or to the higher memory frequency of the latter.

It’s similar to what we have seen above: the S3 GammaChrome S18 is more efficient than the RADEON X600 PRO, their core frequencies being the same but the memory frequency on the S3 card being slightly higher.

Relying on the NV4x architecture that allows writing a double number of Z values per clock, the GeForce 6600 leaves the rest of the test participants far behind. But the GammaChrome, though it doesn’t have UltraShadow II technology, is quite efficient with its Z buffer, too. It is more than by half faster than the RADEON X600 PRO.