by Vladimir Viskov
08/12/2003 | 03:50 AM
July 22, 2003, NVIDIA announced its new “professional” graphics card – Quadro FX 3000 based on the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra GPU. There was the usual blowing-out of cheeks and words like “uncompromising”, “universal for pro applications” and even “unique” (although this same product costing thousand dollars differs from its game mate in the drivers only).
We are most interested in two things, though: speed and quality. The image quality depends on the drivers and they haven’t changed since Quadro FX 2000. You can view the screenshots here. This review is dedicated to speed characteristics of the new card. The comparative background is formed by Quadro FX 2000 (based on GeForce 5800 Ultra), FireGL X1 (based on RADEON 9700 PRO) and a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra based gaming card (to show how greatly optimized drivers may affect the performance of a GPU).
Testbed configuration:
Software:
This benchmark checks if the graphics card is capable of refreshing more than one viewport in 3ds max simultaneously. There is some animation played in all viewports, and to load the graphics accelerator even more each viewport is displayed in a different mode: from Wireframe to Smooth + Highlights.
Here the graphics cards have to work with animation in a single viewport. During the test the camera is flying above the rocks and hills of the moon surface landscape, which is built by 400 thousand polygons displayed in Smooth + Highlights mode.
This test is none other but the same moon surface picture from the previous benchmark. However, besides the landscape itself, we now have some flying objects, like pace crafts or planes.
This benchmark deal with the processing of multiple light sources. Since most graphics cards do not support more than 8 light sources, this test as well as the next two work with 8 lights of different types. Here we will have 8 SpotLight light sources, which move and light some geometrical object.
We should point out that imitating the effect made by SpotLights is a much more resource-hungry process than the imitation of Omni or Directional lighting.
Here we have the same object, but this time it is lit by 8 Directional lights. Directional lights in 3ds max 5 are the fastest unlike the previous package version.
Again we've got the same object and 8 light sources. But this time these are all Omni lights, which involve average resources between SpotLight and Directional lights described above.
This scene boasts "easy" geometry and a couple of light sources. It is displayed in a single viewport on the entire screen thus being an excellent test of the rasterizing speed in Smooth + Highlights mode.
This test is intended to show how fast the graphics cards are when it comes to multiple textures processing. The file contains a lot of textures and very little geometry.
This benchmark emulates the work on the game level, as it contains both: sufficient geometry and numerous textures. The animation is arranged in such a way that the entire scene could be displayed completely.
This test reveals the ability of the graphics accelerators to display textures on the deforming geometry.
This test is aimed at showing what the graphics cards are capable of in terms of transparent textures processing.
The new 3ds max 5 features not only the transparency remaining from the previous version, which is imitated by dithering:
But also the 'real" transparency implemented by blending the pixel color of the overlapping objects:
You can shift between the transparency modes in the viewport control panel:
Of course, you can guess that the more correctly implemented transparency will be slower.
Here the camera flies through the rocks and hills of the moon surface landscape built of 400 thousand polygons, i.e. the scene is the same as in Benchmark 2, actually. However, the picture is displayed in the Wireframe mode.
This is the Benchmark 3 scene in wireframe mode:
As you have seen in the benchmarks, Quadro FX 3000 wins most of the tests. This card has much higher memory bandwidth (1700MHz against 1000MHz) than Quadro 2000, and nearly the same core frequency (450MHz against 466MHz). Still, NVIDIA had to sell out its Quadro 2000 cards (as you remember, NV30-based cards mostly went to the professional market) and that’s why the professional NV35-based product came out later than the gaming analog. However, this is not the end of the battle. ATI is preparing its FireGL X2 graphics card based on the RADEON 9800 PRO GPU. And this card will surely have a higher performance boost over the current flagship, RADEON 9700 PRO-based X1, than in the case of NV30/NV35.