by FastSite
04/18/2002 | 12:00 AM
A considerable while ago :) in one of our first 3DMAX reviews we mentioned that the professional Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro, which used to be one of the most widely spread cards at that time yielded in performance to gaming solutions based on NVIDIA Riva TNT in the professional 3D Studio MAX application.<%BANNER[article]%>
Some time later, we managed to prove once again that professional graphics cards 3Dlabs Oxygen based on the specially designed graphics processors, which cost thousands of dollars at that time, were completely defeated not only by a gaming solution built on then newest GeForce3 chip but even by GeForce2 MX.
It appeared possible because the gaming graphics cards generations change much faster than professional solutions generations and as a result their power grows much quicker. This way it is clear that the graphics cards built on the top NVIDIA gaming solutions have never lost any battle to any professional solutions based on chips designed specifically for 3D modeling applications. And these results were achieved with the drivers optimized for games, i.e. for rendering in a single window in full-screen mode, for scenes with few polygons and large textures compared with the miniatures in the 3ds max viewports. But could you only imagine what advantages will we get once the gaming graphics cards start working with the drivers optimized for multi-window interface, scenes with few textures and "multiple" geometry? You will agree that it is much easier to rewrite some driver modules rather than design graphics cards for professional need anew.
So, the described above approach resulted into "pseudo-professional" cards born gaming and based on gaming chips but then provided with modified drivers. The manufacturers call these graphics cards professional and position them as solutions for professional graphics accelerators market (selling for an appropriate price, of course). However, for the reasons described above I am using inverted commas on the word "professional" on purpose. In order to prevent the users from installing "professional" drivers for their gaming graphics cards the manufacturers introduce some minor changes to the cards electronic layout.
By the way, referring back to a bit of history, I would like to say that the idea of "modifying" the cards of one market segment into the solutions for another market segment doesn't belong to NVIDIA, as you might have thought. In the times of TNT2 based solutions, 3Dlabs Company known for its Oxygen card family released a solution for web-designers called Permedia 3 "Create!" based on the similarly called graphics chip and a "professional" Oxygen VX completely identical to Permedia 3. I have already mentioned in some of our reviews that the only difference between the cards was the drivers…
So, the idea of changing the drivers and ChipID of the GeForce256, so that to turn these gaming solutions into "professional" Quadro, aroused a lot of enthusiasm. The same thing happened to GeForce2 family: Quadro2 Pro was obtained from GeForce2 Pro. However, unlike the gaming GeForce2 Pro, "professional" Quadro2 Pro worked at 50MHz higher chip frequency, which allowed it to outperform the gaming GeForce2 Pro in 3DMAX. NVIDIA marketing people then turned GeForce3 into Quadro DCC, though the working frequencies remained unchanged this time, because of the poor overclocking potential of GeForce3. And now they created a new Quadro4 XGL family from the GeForce4 Ti solutions.
Following in the footsteps of NVIDIA, which has been making "professional" graphics cards based on gaming chips for a long time already, ATI introduced their own solution of the kind: a new "professional solution for mainstream workstations". It is Fire GL 8800 based on the modified gaming RADEON 8500, though it works at 30MHz/300MHz chip and memory frequencies (while RADEON 8500 works at 275MHz/275MHz respectively) and is equipped with 128MB DDR SDRAM (64MB by RADEON 8500).
In this review we will compare the performance of these two "professional" solutions built on the modifications on ATI RADEON 8500 and NVIDIA GeForce4 chips. Also we will include the results for their gaming brothers, RADEON 8500 and GeForce4 Ti 4600, as well as the previous generation Quadro DCC in our tests.
The special drivers for this card feature the following configuration page:
The card works at 300MHz chip and 600MHz (300MHz DDR) memory frequencies.
Quadro4 900XGL is equipped with 2 DVI-Outs and works at 300MHz core and 650MHz memory frequencies.
Quadrî4 700XGL differs from its elder sister by lower working frequencies - 275MHz chip and 550MHz memory, and is equipped with a D-SUB Out and a DVI-Out.
The special MAXTREME drivers, which we have already introduced to you in our previous reviews, feature the following driver configuration page:
We had Quadro4 cards just as NVIDIA samples, and not ELSA retail products with some package (and the latest MAXTREME driver we received in the very last moment). FireGL from ATI though arrived in a colorful package still had the DC with the drivers stuck on the outside of the box, and of course, there was nothing but drivers on that CD. So, I decided to pay special attention to the package contents, special software and the functions of the driver configuration pages in separate reviews devoted to ATI FireGL 8800 and NVIDIA Quadro4 XGL and Quadro4 NVS families. I think it makes sense.
All graphics cards displayed all the benchmark scenes absolutely correctly, which not surprising at all, as Smooth + Highlight modes are undemanding to the driver quality and any graphics accelerator from TVT-GeForce series or RADEON256-RADEON 8500 series can easily work with 3ds max correctly. Of course, this is the merit of software developers who created the corresponding 3ds max modules, because some other programs, such as Maya, Lightwave are much more demanding to the driver quality. However, if you have read all the previous articles about 3ds max, you should remember that all of them prove this point: even in 3DMAX 2.5 we could see such exotic graphics solutions as Matrox 400 and ATI Rage128 work properly.
The only differences in image quality provided by different cards can be noticed in Wireframe mode with Anti-Aliasing enabled: different drivers have different Anti-Aliasing implementation, so that the anti-aliased lines are of different thickness. Of course, the thinner is the anti-aliased line, the better, as thicker lines overlay other objects reducing the resolution this way. The screenshots below illustrate my point: the selected fragments show the most noticeable reduction of the resolution caused by the anti-aliased lines:
All Detonator drivers have the same anti-aliasing algorithm implemented. As you can see, the lines have become much thicker than in the non-AA mode.
The lines in this case as almost as thick as in case of Detonator drivers.
Wow, excellent results! The lines are really thin. Maxtreme drivers tested here are used for all Quadro cards and will work with both: Quadro4 XGL and Quadro DCC.
Here we have to admit that the anti-aliasing quality is the worst of all. The lines are so thick that you will be simply unable to work with complex geometry with anti-aliasing enabled.
So, we found out that the best image quality in Wireframe mode with Anti-Aliasing enabled is provided by Maxtreme drivers for NVIDIA Quadro4 family.
However, we wouldn't consider it a very big advantage of Quadro4 cards over FireGL cards on ATI chips, as far not all 3ds max 4 users prefer Wireframe modes. Most designers do not ever enable Anti-Aliasing, as any Anti-Aliasing, even the best one will inevitable worsen the resolution.
To estimate the testing participants' performance I used the same benchmarks as in the previous reviews. As I have already pointed out multiple times, these benchmarks are recommended for testing in 3D Studio max by the program developer company.
However, I have added another three scenes to the traditional complex one, as they will help us to consider the performance of the today's graphics accelerators in greater detail. The descriptions of the benchmarks will follow.
I decided not to run any tests with the enabled Anti-Aliasing, as all the contemporary graphics accelerators can do 3ds max anti-aliasing without performance losses.
We tested our hardware in the following conditions:
In our test session I will compare the results obtained on ATI FireGL 8800 and NVIDIA Quadro 750XGL and 900XGL with the performance of their gaming "forefathers": ATI RADEON 8500 (275MHz/550MHz) and NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 (300MHz/600MHz). I didn't level out all the working frequencies on purpose. First of all these frequencies are really close to one another, and secondly, there is a certain chip-to-memory frequency ratio recommended by each developer, which will be automatically ruined if all testing participants will be brought to the same level. I also added the results for Quadro DCC (born from GeForce3 200MHz/460MHz) to compare them with the performance of new Quadro XGL solutions to find out if Quadro DCC is worth replacing with the newcomers.
We ran all the tests on the following test platform:
We used the following software:
We used the following drivers for the graphics cards tested:
The first benchmark is a certain "stress-test". It plays an animated scene in four viewports at the same time. However, the rendering methods set in these viewports are different. The scene in two upper viewports is in "Wireframe" mode, in the lower left viewport - in "Smooth + HighLights" + "Edged Faces", and in lower right viewport - in "Smooth + HighLights".
This scene contains very few polygons, only 28 thousand. However, since the animation was played in all four viewports simultaneously, the resulting fps rate appeared not very high.
The first thing that catches your eye is the almost 50% advantage of FireGL 8800 over Quadro4. Secondly, we see that the increase in the chip working frequency of Quadro 4 compared with the predecessor led to a tiny performance growth in this benchmark.
Moreover, it is very illustrative that all NVIDIA graphics cards show almost similar results. Firstly, it means that Maxtreme drivers do not have any advantages over the Detonator drivers when playing animation in 4 viewports, and secondly, it means that the chip frequency of NVIDIA solutions doesn't matter at all: even Quadro DCC clocked 1.5 times lower performed almost as fast as Quadro4 900XGL.
On the other hand, the performance difference between FireGL 8800 and RADEON 8500 is too high. This fact also means a few things to us. Firstly, it implies that ATI software developers did a great job on the professional drivers. But at the same time it means that unlike NVIDIA, ATI's gaming drivers are much less optimized for such applications as 3ds max, which has already become traditional for ATI solutions: the very first drivers for RADEON 256, for instance, couldn't make it work in viewports at all.
This benchmark shows how graphics cards can cope with very complex geometry. It shows the graphics cards performance in Smooth + Highlights mode in scenes with complex geometry.
Here I decided to expand our tests a little bit and added a few tests in Wireframe mode to the Smooth + Highlights mode of both geometric benchmarks.
So what do we see? In Smooth + Highlights mode Quadro4 cards manage to get a bit ahead, however, in Wireframe mode FireGL 8800 rushes forward showing almost twice as fast performance. We also see very clearly that the difference in working frequencies between Quadro4 graphics cards doesn't have any influence on the results.
The third benchmark is devoted to testing the graphics cards abilities in terms of processing complex geometry only. This time the amount of polygons nearly doubled and made 376 thousand. The same surface, as in the previous benchmark scene, is now covered with buildings.
The results obtained in this benchmark are similar to what we have just seen in the previous benchmark, however, we should point out that the relative performance difference between the graphics cards is smaller here than in the previous test, because the geometry here is much more complex.
Judging by the results of the last two geometric benchmarks, we can say that the difference in the working frequencies doesn't matter at all for Quadro4 graphics cards, and for complex geometry we would recommend FireGL 8800, which falls a bit behind in Smooth + Highlights mode but defeats all the competitors in Wireframe mode.
Quadro DCC, the previous generation graphics solution managed to run neck and neck with Quadro4 in Smooth + Highlights mode, however, in Wireframe mode its performance worsened by 20-30%.
The gaming solutions from NVIDIA managed to prove several times faster in geometric benchmarks than the gaming card from ATI. Of course, NVIDIA owes its victory to the "universally" optimized drivers, which RADEON 8500 doesn't have.
This benchmark tests how fast the multiple light sources can be processed. Since most graphics cards do not support more than 8 light sources, this test and the ongoing two tests contain 8 light sources of different types. This test offers 8 SpotLights, which are constantly moving and lighting some kind of asteroid.
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.
This is the first benchmark where the clock frequency difference between the Quadro4 graphics solution matters for the performance. The performance of FireGL 8800 is not very impressive here. It is comparable with that of the gaming RADEON 8500 and is lower than that of GeForce4 Ti4600.
Here we see the same asteroid, but this time it is lit by 8 Directional lights. Directional lights are slower than Omni lights, but faster than SpotLights.
When processing Directional lights, which are less resource hungry than Spot lights, Quadro4 performance has grown much higher, unlike the performance of GeForce4 Ti 4600. The performance of ATI graphics cards, the gaming one and the professional one, grew even more, which means that the driver developers paid much more attention to optimization for Directional lights.
One more time we see the same asteroid with the lights coming from 8 different sources. But now these are all Omni lights, the fastest lights in 3D MAX.
Here the results shown by both: "professional" Quadro4 and gaming GeForce4 Ti 4600 increased compared with the previous cases, and those of both ATI solutions dropped down. Since Omni lights are the least resource demanding, then we can explain the performance drop of ATI solutions only by poor driver optimization for these particular light sources.
This is a scene with 1 light source and very simple geometry, including only 4500 polygons, which occupies the entire viewport. It is aimed at testing the rasterizing speed in Smooth+ Highlights.
When the camera is moving, the graphics card should rasterize big and small polygons (relative to the screen size).
In the Rasterization benchmark professional cards from ATI and NVIDIA showed close results. Also this benchmarks shows us that the GPU working frequency is of great importance here (by the example of Quadro4 cards). We also see that the performances of the gaming GeForce4 Ti 4600 and professional Quadro4 750XGL are nearly equal, which is actually not surprising for us, since the testing conditions of the raterizing test are very close to games. That is why the card shows good results here. The last one in the race is RADEON 8500, as usual.
The next benchmark is devoted to work with textures. The file contains a lot of textures and very little. As for the benchmark, it is just a rotating spherical polygon with the facets covered with 48 different textures.
Very little geometry and many textures involved give us a perfect idea of how fast the graphics cards can process these textures.
The results shown by FireGL 8800 in this texture benchmark are dramatically low: it is almost twice as slow as Qoadro4 based cards. The gaming card from NVIDIA also beats ATI's professional solution almost twice.
I decided to go a little bit farther with this benchmark, which you should know very well already from our previous reviews. I suggest taking a closer look at how well the graphics cards cope with miniatures of different size. I usually test graphics cards in texture benchmarks with the enabled setting: "display texture miniatures in 256x256 pixels viewports", which is a default setting for OpenGL drivers of our today's testing participants. However, in order to test the dependence of the graphics cards performance on the miniature size more thoroughly, I ran the same Benchmark 8 with the miniature textures settings from 128x128 pixels to 1024x1024 pixels.
The results are given in the table below:
| GeForce4 Ti4600 | Quadro4 900XGL | Quadro4 750XGL | Quadro DCC | FireGL 8800 | RADEON 8500 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 128 | 194.3 | 275.6 | 218.3 | 156.4 | 127.4 | 125.3 |
| 256 | 191.2 | 265.4 | 216.3 | 149.1 | 120.1 | 114.8 |
| 512 | 157.4 | 214.4 | 171.3 | 114.4 | 92.1 | 77.8 |
| 1024 | N/A | 5.2 | 5 | 1.3 | 5 | N/A |
Since OpenGL driver doesn't allow setting the texture size over 512x512 pixels, we have no data for the gaming graphics cards with the settings exceeding 512 pixels.
The results of a more detailed testing session provided in this table prove that NVIDIA cards retain the twofold priority with all the settings. The miniatures of 1024x1024 and up (Maxtreme drivers allow setting miniature size up to 4096x4096 pixels) make the texture rich scenes impossible t process, as these miniatures do not fit even into 128MB of the local memory and the graphics card performance is simply killed by the texture transfer rate via AGP.
This is a fully textured room with a camera moving inside. This benchmark is very close to real applications because it has a lot of textures, not very simple geometry and several light sources. It shows what graphics cards are capable of when processing pretty complex scenes in Smooth + Highlights mode.
The situation here is nearly the same as in the previous benchmark, however, both gaming cards, RADEON 8500 and GeForce4, showed considerably lower performance compared with "professional" cards than in the previous case: RADEON 8500 performed twice as slow, and GeForce4 Ti 4600 - 1.5 times slower.
Animated "waves" with a texture laid over them show how fast the card can process and modify the textures.
Summing up the results of all texturing benchmarks we can conclude that ATI software developers really left out the driver optimization for texture-rich scenes. Even the gaming GeForce4 Ti 4600 is about 1.5-2 times faster than "professional" FireGL 8800. Therefore, if you are planning to work with highly textured scenes, ATI products are hardly the right choice to make: the relatively cheap (compared with the professional cards) GeForce4 Ti 4600 will suit much better for these needs.
This benchmark runs with different speeds in the Wireframe mode. 111 thousand polygons in Wireframe mode will be a really tough test for any modern graphics card.
In Wireframe mode the situation is totally different from what we saw in texture-rich benchmarks: FireGL 8800 is almost twice as fast as Quadro4 family. It looks as if ATI software team put all their knowledge and effort into optimization for Wireframe modes. And I am absolutely sure that these are solely drivers that matter, because RADEON 8500 gaming graphics card showed very poor results here, being even slower than GeForce4 Ti 4600.
All the previous benchmarks (except Benchmark 1) showed the graphics cards performance when working in a single viewport. However, most designers spend a lot of time working with 4 or 3 viewports at the same time. Therefore, I decided to pay special attention to the performance of our testing participants when there is more then one viewport. To test I selected two scenes, which you should be very familiar with, if you have read other articles about 3ds max on our site.
This is the famous raterization test:
Now you see the same scene in Smooth + Highlights mode:
I decided to repeat the results of this benchmark here once again just for your convenience: you should have already seem them above in the Benchmark 7 section. I suggest that you compare the results shown by graphics cards in single-viewport mode with their performance in case of multiple viewports involved. Here come the tests:
This is the same benchmark but there is only one active viewport out of four: the lower right one. Here we will see is our guinea pigs can perform the rendering in smaller viewports faster.
As we see, the performance grew up quite significantly, as we moved to a smaller viewport.
Here we have the same scene as in the previous case (see the screenshot above) but this time all the four viewports are active. In the three viewports except the lower right one the scene is in Wireframe mode, and only the camera displaying the scene in the lower right corner is moving in these viewports.
Here the results shown by our testing participants are almost equal.
The scene is displayed in all the four viewports. In the three of them the - in Smooth + Highlights mode, and in the fourth - in Wireframe mode.
Look, the mode viewports are involved and the higher is the workload, the better is the performance of ATI FireGL 8800 compared with NVIDIA Quadro4 cards. In Benchmark 1.1 when we had only one viewport, it fell behind Quadro4 solutions, while in case of 4 viewports and maximum workload (i.e. animation), it is wining the race.
The next benchmark measures the performance in Wireframe mode. 111 thousand polygons in Wireframe mode will become a really tough test for any graphics card.
This is the scene in a single viewport tested:
FireGL is leading in geometrical benchmarks, especially in Wireframe mode with a huge advantage. Let's see what happens if the animation is displayed in all the four viewports.
The performance ratio remained the same: 1:2 in favour of FireGL 8800.
So summing up the results in case of multiple viewports, we can say that ATI FireGL 8800 is an indisputable leader.
If you have read my previous articles you should remember, that besides the benchmarks recommended by 3ds max developers, I usually investigated the performance of the solutions tested in "real" scenes. This time, the number of complex benchmarks of the kind has become bigger.
The animation is arranged in such a way that the camera is constantly moving from the foreground to the background.
The performance of Quadro4 900XGL and FireGL 8800 in Wireframe mode is nearly equal, and in Smooth + Highlights mode NVIDIA solution proves 20% faster.
It is also very interesting that unlike the results obtained in synthetic benchmarks described above, NVIDIA's professional graphics cards outperform the gaming ones much greater here.
The animation is arranged in such a way that the camera is moving around the room capturing all objects of the scene.
The situation here is similar to that described in the previous benchmark, however, in this case the performance gap is even higher: Quadro4 900XGL performs best of all in Wireframe, and in Smooth + Highlights mode its advantage over the rivals makes 50%! The performance gap between professional and gaming graphics solutions from NVIDIA in this benchmark is also higher than in the previous one: the difference in Wireframe mode is triple.
The scene with a great amount of polygons will be a perfect test of the cards geometrical abilities. The animation is arranged in such a way that the camera is turning inside this "lab" and even goes beyond the "walls".
Again FireGL 8800 proves its indisputable leadership in scenes with massive geometry.
And in conclusion I suggest taking a closer look at one very interesting scene.
This benchmark allows evaluating the graphics cards performance, and to be more precise the driver optimization, when there is only one rotating model in the scene. In all the four viewports there is only one animated object: the fan (marked with a red rectangle):
This benchmark tests the drivers, and not the hardware, since as we see, the results shown by Quadro DCC, GeForce4 Ti4600 and Quadro4 cards are similar, though these solutions work at different clock frequencies. Also we notice that ATI FireGL8800 is almost 50% faster than Quadro4 based graphics cards, which is an excellent result for a scene with small geometry. NVIDIA software developers seem to have simply left out the case when there is only one small moving object in the entire scene.
As the tests showed, we can't say which solution, ATI FireGL 8800 or NVIDIA Quadro4, is better and which is worse. The graphics cards perform differently in different scenes and it makes them fit into different segments of the professional graphics market.
In the scenes with complex geometry in Wireframe mode, ATI graphics card is an indisputable leader. Also FireGL 8800 proved much faster when working with several viewports rather than with a single viewport opened to the maximum, and in this case FireGL 8800 is faster in both modes: Wireframe and Smooth + Highlights. These features make ATI FireGL 8800 a perfect choice for model-makers, for instance.
The advantage of Quadro4 900XGL shows its best in Smooth + Highlights mode in case of a single viewport. NVIDIA solutions are beyond any competition especially when working with the miniatures of large textures, which makes it the best buy for animation needs and texturing of the ready surfaces.
However, professional graphics cards comparison is the comparison of their driver optimization in the first place and finding out where the driver optimization appeared incomplete.
In general, we could say that although the drivers of all the professional graphics cards tested do provide a certain performance increase compared with the results shown by gaming solutions, they still need to be optimized and worked on more. As we saw, Maxtreme driver doesn't single out the changing object of the scene and redraws the entire scene. Moreover, this driver works perfectly in a single viewport (so that Quadro4 900XGL outpaced FireGL 8800 in most cases). However, as it comes to animation, even to the simplest one, such as moving the camera, it slows down the performance of the card in four viewports so greatly, that FireGL 8800 leaves it very far behind.
As for ATI drivers, things are also not that impeccable here. The freshest drivers, which we received together with the card allowed it to show excellent results when processing multiple viewports, complex geometry and wireframe modes. However, the Smooth + Highlights mode appeared a stumbling stone for ATI FireGL 8800. Moreover, FireGL 8800 appeared 1.5-2 times slower than Quadro4 900XGL when working with textures and lights.
Anyway, despite all the mentioned drawbacks and bottlenecks, we have every right to state that "professional" graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA ensure good fps rate even in very "heavy" scenes and grant an over three times higher performance than the current gaming solutions show.