Old Hand Meets Young Firebrand: ATi FireGL X1 and Nvidia Quadro4 980XGL

Benchmarks: Seven Candidates For Testing

The four initial analyses resulted in the following findings:

• Platform: The Intel 850/ Tehama with RDRAM is better than the E7205/ Granite Bay with DDR266 memory.
• AGP8X does not represent any advances over AGP4X in practice.
• Windows 2000 performs better than Windows XP.
• Hyperthreading should only be activated under Windows XP, not under Windows 2000.

These four statements refer solely to current OpenGL workstation applications and should not be applied to other application areas such as office or games. These constraints may well change once updates of chipsets, BIOS versions, drivers or service packs for operating systems become available. It this turns out to be the case, THG will of course report on it. All the same, equipment buyers should let themselves be guided by current conditions and not speculations about the future.

We used the synthetic benchmark suite SPECViewperf 7.0 for our tests. This makes it possible to give a rough classification of performance. Our application benchmarks Solidworks 2001 Plus, Solidedge V11 and 3D Studio Max R4.2 (all issued by the recognized benchmark organization SPEC) show how the graphics cards behave under actual everyday conditions. These are generally more important in any evaluation.

Viewperf 7.0

The Viewperf 7.0 suite is based on six individual tests, which can be downloaded from the SPEC website: 3dsmax-01, light-05, drv-08, proe-01, dx-07 and ugs-01. The following criteria were 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 from various applications are used here. The underlying application, however, is not used. Here's a description of the individual viewsets.

• 3dsmax-01: based on 3D Studio Max 3.1, has three models with an average 1.5 million vertices. Scenes with various light sources were tested.
• dx-07: based on the IBM Data Explorer application, 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 different 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 containing 2.1 million vertices.