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The four pre-analyses from our last test (Old Hand Meets Young Firebrand: ATi FireGL X1 and Nvidia Quadro4 980XGL ) produced the following findings:

• Platform: Intel 850/ Tehama with RDRAM is better than the E7205/ Granite Bay with DDR266 memory;
• AGP8X has no practical advantages over AGP4X;
• Windows 2000 performs better than Windows XP;
• Hyper-Threading should only be activated under Windows XP, but not under Windows 2000.

These four statements refer solely to current OpenGL workstation applications and should not be applied to other areas such as office or games. The underlying situation may change along with updates of chipsets, BIOS versions, drivers or service packs for operating systems. If there is a change, THG will let you know about it. All the same, decision makers should let themselves be guided by current conditions, not by speculations.

We use the synthetic benchmark suite SPECViewperf 7.0 for our tests. It allows a rough classification of performance. How the graphics cards behave under actual daily conditions is revealed by our application benchmarks Solidworks 2001 Plus and 3D Studio Max R4.2, both issued by the respected benchmark organization SPEC. The latter are generally more important for an evaluation.

Viewperf 7.0 (Synthetic)

The Viewperf 7.0 suite is based on six individual tests of (3dsmax-01, light-05, drv-08, proe-01, dx-07 and ugs-01), and can be downloaded from the SPEC website. The following criteria are measured:

• 3D primitives, including points, lines, line_strip, line_loop, triangles, triangle_strip, triangle_fan, quads and polygons;
• Attributes per vertex, per primitive and per frame;
• Lighting;
• Texture mapping;
• Alpha blending;
• Fogging;
• Anti-aliasing;
• Depth buffering.

So-called viewsets are used from various applications. The underlying application, however, is not used. Here are the descriptions of the individual viewsets.

• 3dsmax-01: based on 3D Studio Max 3.1; has three models with an average 1.5 million vertices; scenes are tested with various light sources.
• dx-07: based on the application IBM Data Explorer; has ten different tests.
• drv-08: based on DesignReview from Intergraph; has five different tests.
• light-05: based on the Discreet Lightscape Radiosity application; has four tests.
• proe-01: based on Pro/ENGINEER 2000i2; measures two models in three modes - shaded, wireframe and hidden-line removal (HLR).
• ugs-01: based on Unigraphics V17; tests a machine model composed of 2.1 million vertices.