X-bit labs

Club3D Volari Duo V8 Ultra Review: XGI Volari Family Coming to Graphics Market (page 11)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov , Tim Tscheblockov

[ 01/15/2004 | 01:47 PM ]

Synthetic Benchmarks: Pixel Shader Performance

Now let’s check our well our today’s hero can cope with pixel shaders:

The per-pixel lighting using shader version 2.0 appears a total fiasco: even the morally and technically outdated GeForce FX 5600 Ultra easily outperforms the new Volari solution. However, when we shift to simple shaders our hero proves much more successful and surpasses both youngest NVIDIA cards.

I dare suppose that XGI Volari Duo V8 Ultra features similar weak spots as GeForce FX, because its graph is shaped just like the one of GeForce FX: it looks like a small hump, where the decrease indicates noticeable performance drop when we shift to shader version 2.0.

When we disable Z writes the overall picture remains unchanged.

However, when we disable color writes, all graphics cards except Volari speed up almost hitting their theoretical maximum. Frankly speaking, the graph for Club3D solution makes us think that it doesn’t work correctly in our benchmark. Or maybe its “unique” architecture simply doesn’t allow disabling the color writes completely. Or maybe it is all about the unfinished drivers, although this is the most unlikely supposition for this low-level benchmark.