Review AGP Graphic Cards

3D Windows 95

The former leader amongst the 3D cards found its new master. Cards with the Riva 128 chip are smoking any other card in this test.

As soon as the textures get larger than the onboard texture memory, textures have to get transported from main memory. The Monster 3D reaches its limits already at a resolution of 640x480 and is suffering from the slower PCI bus, thus it has the worst result here. The new 3D king Riva 128 wins this test as well as all the other 3D tests.

The Riva 128 is still performing best here as well, although it has only 4 MB local memory. This means that even at this resolution the Riva 128 will have to use main memory for textures, using AGP's DIME.

The Revolution 3D doesn't use AGP's DIME feature in its driver yet, which is the main reason why the performance is so bad in this test. Unfortunately is 1024x768 more than the Riva 128 can support under 3D, because 4 MB aren't enough for the front, back and z-buffer.

The most interesting thing in these results is that here the Fire GL 1000 Pro seems faster than the Monster 3D. This is probably due to the reduced complexity of the benchmark compared to 3D Winbench. NVidia's Riva 128 is taking a huge lead here.