3ds max 4.xx viewports renderer
3ds max 5 viewports renderer
Final Renderer
by FastSite
10/10/2002 | 12:00 AM
Not so long ago Discreet, the company dealing with the development of software packages for video production and 3D content creation released the fifth version of its most popular 3D modeling software - 3ds max. This version is completely different from all the previous ones, as it boasts extended animation options, functionally richer final rendering, new shadowing algorithms, and many other key innovations, which will take a lot of time to list even. Also they introduced a lot of changes to the viewports renderer, so that the image built by the graphics cards in viewports now looks much more realistic, in other words is much closer to what we actually get after the final rendering is complete. The best example here will be the famous "cottage":
However, in this article I am not going to focus on the functionality or usability of the new version, and not about its abilities in terms of viewports displaying. All these issues will be discussed in greater detail in a separate review, which is to come out quite soon. The today's article will be devoted to the performance of contemporary gaming graphics cards in 3ds max 5. Among the testing participants you will find: the respectful NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600, the powerful (in games) ATI RADEON 9700 Pro and the so long-awaited Matrox Parhelia-512. To make our comparison more illustrative, we will also include the results for the "professional" NVIDIA Quadro4 900XGL, which differs from the gaming GeForce4 Ti4600 by slightly higher working frequencies and the drivers optimized for professional 3D modeling applications (read more about professional graphics cards in the article called: ATI FireGL 8800 against NVIDIA Quadro 4 in 3ds max).
Our test system was configured as follows:
We used the following software:
The graphics cards listed above were tested with the following drivers:
The driver settings for NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600, ATI RADEON 9700 Pro and Matrox Parhelia looked as follows:
The Maxtreme driver settings for NVIDIA Quadro4 900XGL were as follows:
During the tests we disabled V-Sync for all graphics cards involved.
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.
The tested graphics accelerators get into conditions pretty far from real gaming. Unlike games, all the four viewports are refreshed simultaneously instead of one, three viewports are working in Wireframe mode, while most games use shadowed rendering.
The results of this test once again prove that the driver support of wireframe modes, which are quite specific for gaming accelerators, is very important in professional applications. It is much more important than the common raw power.
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.
The testing conditions in this benchmark are more common for the gaming solutions, however, they would be unable to quickly display massive geometry like that without the properly written driver units responsible for geometry processing.
As you can see, the driver quality, namely their "professionalism" play a much more important part in this test, than in the previous one. RADEON 9700 Pro appears twice as slow as GeForce4 Ti4600, and Matrox Parhelia completely failed this benchmark.
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.
The result here is similar to what we have already seen: NVIDIA's gaming solution takes the lead due to better implemented geometry processing in its drivers. While the professional graphics card from the same manufacturer demonstrates twice as high performance only due to proper driver optimization.
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.
All gaming graphics cards show almost identical results, and the professional Quadro4 gets 15-20% ahead.
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.
As for Directional lights processing, ATI RADEON 9700 Pro shows better results than GeForce4 Ti4600, and gets really close to Quadro4 900XGL.
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.
Summing up the results of the lighting tests we can say that the contemporary gaming graphics cards prove nearly equally fast.
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.
Matrox graphics card is traditionally behind RADEON 9700 Pro and GeForce4 Ti4600, but this time the mentioned performance difference is almost twice as big. Quadro4 again performs beautifully fast due to proper driver optimization.
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.
Here the outsider appeared RADEON 9700 Pro. It most probably owes its failure to not finalized drivers. Quadro4 proved the best as usual.
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.
Although in this test the graphics cards didn't boast any hundreds of fps, Matrox Parhelia again fell twice as far behind.
This test reveals the ability of the graphics accelerators to display textures on the deforming geometry.
The gaming graphics cards coped with this task equally well. Summing up the results of the texturing tests we can conclude that the drivers of all the testing participants feature equally good implementation of the texture processing. However, as soon as texturing appears not the only task, and there is also geometry that needs processing, Matrox Parhelia's performance slows down significantly.
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.
What do we see here? Firstly, as soon as we shift to proper transparency from the "simple" one, the performance drops down by about 50%. Secondly, the gaming graphics cards show very diverse results, so that the leader appears almost twice as fast as the outsider. This can be explained only by the driver quality, and not by the different working frequencies.
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.
The wireframe mode is never used in games, that is why the results our testing participants showed in it is 90% determined by the driver quality: NV25 provided with specific drivers optimized for wireframe modes, which we al know a sQuadro4, appeared 4 times as fast as the same NV25 based solution featuring gaming drivers.
This is the Benchmark 3 scene in wireframe mode:
The graphics cards perform as fast as in the previous case. GeForce4 copes with the processing of massive geometry in wireframe modes best of all the gaming solutions tested. Although professional graphics cards boasting optimized drivers nevertheless turn much faster than their gaming fellows.
For years NVIDIA graphics cards have been proving quite successful in 3D Studio MAX/3ds max viewports. Even in the times of 3D Studio MAX 2.0 when ATI RADEON graphics card with the first driver versions hitting the market then couldn't display anything in the viewports of this software package, the competing solution from NVIDIA, GeForce2 GTS performed brilliantly against its background. It not only displayed the scenes quite correctly for any viewport settings, but also outperformed the professional graphics solutions of those times, which were developing too slowly.
And today, when this famous 3D modeling software package has been renamed to 3ds max, the best result still belong to NVIDIA. NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4600, which is now definitely the best solution for work in viewports for this money. On the other hand, it is really nice to see that the competitors can already offer solutions, which work correctly in 3ds max even with the very first driver versions. If it goes on like that, we dare suppose that NVIDIA's positions will be threatened by some pretty powerful competitors one day.