Maya 2013: OpenGL Results
Drivers Used
Nvidia’s 311.50 driver is a really good all-purpose build, but the most recently-certified driver when we ran all of our benchmarks was the 305.93, which is why we used it. Early in July, Nvidia published its 320.49 package, but there is no mention of changes to Maya's performance in the release notes. Regardless, the situation is a lot better than AMD's side of the fence, where searching for a Maya 2013-certified driver yields zero results.
Driver | Nvidia | AMD |
---|---|---|
Workstation | 305.93 (Certified) | Catalyst Pro 9.003.3.3 (Not Certified) |
Gaming | 314.22 | Catalyst 13.3 Beta 3Catalyst 13.5 Beta 2 (Radeon HD 7990) |
Maya 2013: OpenGL Performance
For this specific page, we skipped Viewport 2.0 with DirectX 11 and focused on the older SPECapc 2009 suite because it employs OpenGL. I'm only interested in four tests at this point, and we'll come back to the photo-realistic rendering later.
The completion time for each benchmark is directly tied to each card's performance. And as we can see, the desktop cards don't stand a chance, regardless of how well they do under DirectX. Of course, this is a result of the drivers that accompany those workstation-class cards, which include optimizations that let them hardware-accelerate a great many functions in spite of the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM). The gaming cards have to make do with a universal software emulation instead.
Nvidia's older GeForce GTX 580 posts some strange results. It manages to win one test by a wide margin and lose another one by a similarly large delta. Otherwise, the Nvidia and AMD cards trade blows, while SLI and CrossFire go to waste.