X-bit labs

S3 DeltaChrome S8 Gets Nitro Acceleration: Review of the Revamped S8 (page 7)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 03/09/2004 | 02:56 AM ]

Synthetic Benchmarks: Pixel Shaders

The Fillrate Tester program we used to test the fillrate can also work with Pixel Shaders:

The performance of DeltaChrome is pretty ambiguous: it falls behind and then outpaces RADEON 9600 XT every now and then. The best result is still demonstrated with simple Pixel Shaders version 1.1. Here you can also see the performance difference between DeltaChrome S8 and DeltaChrome S8 Nitro most clearly.

When we disable Z writes, the situation remains the same.

When we disable color writes, DeltaChrome immediately loses to everyone. Unfortunately, I cannot find a suitable explanation to this phenomenon. There is absolutely no progress since the last review of the DeltaChrome solution. Either the software developers haven’t yet tackled pixel shaders optimization, or it is the architectural peculiarities of the DeltaChrome chip that cannot be improved on the software level.