2D, Acceleration, And Windows: Aren't All Graphics Cards Equal?

Name: Tom2D Benchmark: Radeon HD 5870 Vs. GeForce GTX 285 In Windows 7 - 2D, Acceleration, And Windows: Aren&#039;t All Graphics Cards Equal?
Author: Bestofmedia Team

by Bestofmedia Team January 26, 2010 at 12:00 AM

156 Comments

Tom2D Benchmark: Radeon HD 5870 Vs. GeForce GTX 285 In Windows 7

With the help of this new benchmark, we hope to better understand the root causes for the 2D bottlenecks we’ve so recently discovered for the Radeon HD 5870, 5850, and 5750 cards we have at our disposal. To begin with, we proved to ourselves that 2D acceleration of GDI functions in Windows 7 definitely doesn’t work for any of these Radeon HD 5000-series models, rather than simply slowing down dramatically. Is it a driver or a hardware problem? Nvidia doesn’t come through this testing blemish-free, either: even for its cards, not all possible functions are truly accelerated.

Test System
Processor	Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600, 2.4 GHz @ 3.2 GHz, G0 Stepping, 8MB L2 Cache, LGA 775
RAM	4GB DDR2-1066 CL5
Motherboard	A-Data Vitesta Extreme
Operating System	Windows 7 Ultimate x64
Graphics Cards	Radeon HD 5870, GeForce GTX 285
Graphics Drivers	Catalyst 9.12, GeForce 195.62

Graphics card	Clock Rate With Aero/DWM Enabled	Clock Rate With No Acceleration
ATI Radeon HD 5870	850 MHz	157 MHz
Nvidia GeForce GTX 285	648 MHz	300 MHz

In order to establish a better baseline for the purposes of comparing 2D acceleration enabled/disabled, we also ran all of our tests on an older nForce 610i chipset with integrated GeForce 7050 graphics (lacking an on-board frame buffer). We installed the same CPU and 4GB RAM, and used the same 64-bit Windows 7 operating system. We also substituted the predecessor to the Radeon HD5870, ATI's Radeon HD 4870, in our other test platforms as well.

Test 1: Rendering TrueType and OpenType

All candidates fall into the same narrow range for this test.

We would like to hear what Nvidia has to say about why its on-board graphics processor renders 2D graphics faster than a GeForce GTX 285, even if the difference is fairly modest.

Using the Radeon HD 4870 as a baseline control placed it in the bottom third of the pack, without showing any real weaknesses of which to speak.

Test 2: Drawing Lines

Surprisingly, the Radeon HD 5870 is simply incapable of rendering hardware-accelerated lines with any reasonable performance.

Whereas both of our test subject deliver acceptable and reasonably-close results with 2D acceleration turned off, leaving the job to the CPU, a substantial gap between the two cards opens up once we enable Aero. The GeForce GTX 285 runs as much as 11 times faster than ATI's Radeon HD 5870. Worse yet, an on-board graphics processor from a two year-old $50 motherboard bests this $400 graphics card by an order of magnitude.

Furthermore, our readings for the Radeon HD 4870 show little difference between Aero-enabled and basic (non-accelerated) Windows 7 graphics performance, suggesting no acceleration for drawing lines in Windows 7. This card is measurably slower than a GeForce GTX 285 and the on-board graphics solution, but is able to best the Radeon HD 5870 with acceleration turned on and off.

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Bestofmedia Team & Igor Wallossek

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fatkid35

next, toms finds bigfoot eating a chupicabre! WTF? nice catch guys.
pcxt21

Very nice work! Until that little update I was ready to put my old Matrox Millennium (1996/1997 I think) 2d accelerator back into my gaming rig...
For those who still remember Matrox...shouldn't that be included in the test as well? Ancient history shows that it was the best card to be paired with VooDoo when first released...:P
one-shot

LOL. The clip of Steve Ballmer looks like an ad from the late Billy Mays. To think he's the CEO of Microsoft after watching that clip makes me laugh. I'm going to watch it again.
chookman

I actually went to put a Professional Matrox card (G550 PCI-e) in my Windows 7 machinde for a few more displays... alas it seems most of the range doesnt have Windows 7 drivers yet
killerclick

Hey, I have GF7050 on my motherboard but I'm not using it!
belardo

The sad thing is, as shown was that Windows 1.0~3.0 were never an operating system, ever. 1.0~2.x we're never really used by anyone, yet Amigas and Macs had full GUI functionality since 85/84... Windows3 was at least usable, but still a single-tasking POS, and yet MS-DOS was able to dominate the computer industry... not because of talent, but because of luck, good moves by Gates & Ballmer and the stupidity of IBM. It kind of worked out anyway thou.

Think about it, it wasn't until the tail-end of 1995, with the release of Windows95, did MS produce an actual GUI OS for the general public, 10 whole years after Apple's Mac and the Amiga by chicken lips. Atari only copied much of the hardware abilities of Amiga with a variant of a MS-DOS clone.

Only business bought PC-Clones in the 80s~90s, paying around $1500~4000 per desktop. Since IBM didn't make the OS and the hardware was generic, it was super easy for clones to exists. Home users bought Amigas and Macs and laughed as DOS users... but in the end, they lost to the clones.

At one time in 1990, the Computer Shopper Mag was about 500 pages (phone book) with at least 500 Clone companies advertising.

Windows is still the Copy-Cat OS. Its still an ugly beast under the hood. At least Windows7 runs good and looks nice.
Raid3r

Indeed, way to take one for the team..I am one of those 2d workers and greatly appreciate the foot that was used to affirm the position of 2d recognition on these "new" cards. I can't say it enough.
micky_lund

woot for toms...
catch some more massive companies out, and make them fix up their drivers
belardo

I just finished reading this entire article. A good one too guys.

While I had my rant about old MS days, I did work in the PC field starting with 3.1. We'd benchmark various video cards with programs that would test lines, boxes, etc. This WAS important for some games like DOOM and Quake which were not "true" 3D cards we have today.

For every new type of PC build or a clients computer, I would save these generic overall system benchmarks. And I *have* notice different 2D performance abilities of computers and the various cards. All super fast compared to the 90s, but I've seen a GF card perform worse than an older ATI, but also an older ATI work a bit better than a newer one. These are all WinXP and don't have anything to do with the problems of Win7 and/or DX11... Part2 isn't out yet... but I would be curious to see if the problems in Win7 happens in Vista with DX11 installed hmmm.

ATI has been putting all their work into 3D gaming performance, its good to see that they have put a team to fix their 2D issues. There is a good chance that this is a DX11 issue they were not aware of. Since Nvidia doesn't have any DX11 parts (but a DX10.5) - this "bug" doesn't yet show... but I'm speculating of course.

With the eye-candy of Win7, the 2D performance *IS* important for those doing work, watching videos, etc. No good excuse to miss this, and hopefully ATI will have it resolved in 1-2 months.

PS: Your memory usage chart of vista vs Win7 shows exactly WHY Vist . That is why Windows7 runs pretty good on a 1GB computer, but Vista still needs at least 3GB for a bottom-end PC. My notebook has Win7rc with 1GB, runs fine.

Hey, will your results sometime include intel graphics? After this bug-issue is resolves, include overall-2D scores with your graphics Charts.
notty22

This is no news to the enthusiasts, ATI drivers. One more reason to go green, Nvidia,
BartG

So the Vista bashers now need to rethink why they dont like Vista, its not the OS (even though its not perfect), its the lack of 2D performance from your cards!
sohei

good article
supasso

The new ATI cards throttling down pretty aggressively in 2D AKA "idle" mode to keep the power consumption low. Perhaps that's what happening here.
sohei

notty22 you exaggerate...if ATi has a problem with drivers in 2d, what about nvidia with new drivers ? no over-clocking...you know that?

pls read more than talk
eddieroolz

Reading it at 2:20am, it was hard to grasp every part of the article but it did arouse my mind a bit :P But good job to you guys!

Now back to programming in C xD
mitch074

@supasso: even throttled down, current cards far exceed the capabilities of older 2D cards; the problem is that, if an operation is badly optimized, it can slow down even the most powerful system to a crawl, by requiring thousands of CPU cycles and as many sleep() cycles, to perform something that, on said older hardware, would take a few cycles at best.

One good area to look at here, is the Linux world. Why is it relevant?
- dixit an AMD engineer, 90% of the Linux driver code is common with Windows'. That includes 2D, video and OpenGL.
- there are two (well three, but this is not really relevant here) Ati card drivers for R600/700 cards: one (proprietary, very close to Windows) from AMD, one (FOSS, based on AMD documents and reverse engineering) from the Xorg development team.

Benchmarking those in 2D (say, with X's own benches and GNOME's) shows that the
FOSS driver is around 4 times (and in some cases, 100x) faster than AMD's driver on purely 2D operations - showing that, indeed, AMD's driver needs a kick in the arse to push windows around.

Please note that Xorg does also provide purely 2D (EXA+Render) and 2.5D (EXA+Composite) modes. enabling Composite on AMD's driver causes it to slow down across the range, while it actually improves things on the Free driver when used with a compositing ('like Aero', although it actually came out before) window manager - and a GPU that is at least level with a Radeon 9500.

Please note that the very same thing happens with Nvidia hardware, eventhough Nvidia seems to have done a slightly better job at supporting 2.5D (the difference between Nouveau and the Nvidia blob is less apparent).
dimitrik

Excellent article and about time 2D got some attention. The amount of emphasis on 3D graphics in the majority of technology media is insane given that gamers are hardly a majority among mainstream users. Clearly this extreme emphasis on gaming has finally led to the "core" features being neglected by the vendors!
haplo602

Same but worse situation is with ATI linux drivers. Their 2d part is horribly bad even compared to the OSS X11 drivers. I just hope that by fixing the 2d in Windows, they will get to fix 2d in Linux as well.
Wouldn't this benchmark be better suited using Direct2D instead of the long-since-deprecated GDI? You should get performance improvements for all of the graphics cards that way. I did some checking and it seems that at least since Vista, the main GUI/window manager has been using DirectX, not GDI. Someone brought up the issue of vector drawing programs like Inkscape (GTK), but I don't know what those use.

Here is a 2008 article espousing Direct2D over GDI/GDI+:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/gdigdi_move_over_microsoft_introduces_direct2d

@Belardo

Both Windows 3.x and Mac OS 9 & earlier were cooperative multi-tasking OSes, and thus suffered the same fatal flaw. Windows 9x offered preemptive multi-tasking and memory protection (and management), whereas Mac OS 9 & earlier all had such poor protection that any program could easily read/write any other programs memory space intentionally and accidentally. Prior to the MultiFinder's creation in 1988 (OS 5), there was no multitasking at all, and the Desk Accessories had to be written using drivers to emulate it. That's the reason Mac OS X was created; all the previous versions were such utterly irredeemable, insecure, unreliable pieces of shit, they had to start almost from scratch.

I don't know what an "actual GUI OS" is in your mind, but it doesn't seem like Mac OS classic qualified by your own standards. OSes can run within OSes, and I don't just mean emulating hardware running a "full OS," but rather the definition of an OS doesn't require that it be capable of running completely on its own. This why some research and student OSes are made to run on top of pre-existing ones.

The way I see it, Windows 3.x was like a powerful DOS extender (DOS4GW is an example of a dos extender that many games used albeit 32-bit) that added a graphics subsystem, cooperative multi-tasking, and ran in 16-bit protected mode (DOS ran in real mode).
This is a rather interesting article. Thanks for the good read. What is strange though is the fact that a lot of companies, including Microsoft is looking at Direct2D to speed up browsers and various apps. I find it strange that MS have not spoken more harshly to the Graphics people of ATI and nVidia.

One take 2D for granted, yet it is clear that no one at ATI or nVidia does...yet we spend 99.5% of our time in there...

It also points out some of the underlying problems of MS designs...they have so much raw horsepower to yield, that it is no longer important to focus on optimisation. If it where, this would have been picked up earlier and flagged during the beta stages.
notty22

Straatkat I find it strange that MS have not spoken more harshly to the Graphics people of ATI and nVidia.

Because its only ATI that has the problem. Even Nvidia's IGP performs satisfactorily. Lack of testing, rushing out a product before its right.
This is poor. Fermi may be late, but it will be right.
Onus

No HD5xxx for me until this is fixed.
scrumworks

Update (1/26/2010): Nice to know AMD has taken a task to fix those pending issues even those problems might just look bad in benchmarks and not in real use.