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3D Mark 2003 Sparks Controversy
cribb writes "3DMark 2003 is out, sparking an intense debate on how trustworthy its assessment of current graphics cards is, after some harsh words by nVidia and the reply from Futuremark. THG has an analysis of the current situation definately worth reading. The article exposes some problems with the new GeforceFX previously mentioned in a slashdot article on Doom3 and John Carmack. Alas, here seems to be no end to the troubles with the new nVidia flagship." If you've run the benchmark, post your scores here, and we'll all compare.
AMD Athlon1400C@1550
512MB Samsung DDR, CL2@147FSB
Geforce4ti4200, clocked@260core, 520memory
a whopping: 1080 points.
Did i mention that this benchmarks makes *heavy* utilization of the otherwis in *no* game used Pixelshader 1.4? Teh exact one, that Nvidia didnt implement in its GF4Ti cards - where only 1.3 and 1.1 is in?
Guess, who has 1.4 - ATI has...
You could also call this benchmark "ATIbench2003", but that was the same in 2000, when 3dmark2000 was favoring Nvidia cards over 3dfx simply because of the lack of 32bit colordepth.
Sheeeshh...
You should read Carmack's comment that pretty much summed up the gist of the debates:
The R200 path has a slight speed advantage over the ARB2 path on the R300, but only by a small margin, so it defaults to using the ARB2 path for the quality improvements. The NV30 runs the ARB2 path MUCH slower than the NV30 path. Half the speed at the moment. This is unfortunate, because when you do an exact, apples-to-apples comparison using exactly the same API, the R300 looks twice as fast, but when you use the vendor-specific paths, the NV30 wins.
The reason for this is that ATI does everything at high precision all the time, while NVIDIA internally supports three different precisions with different performances. To make it even more complicated, the exact precision that ATI uses is in between the floating point precisions offered by NVIDIA, so when NVIDIA runs fragment programs, they are at a higher precision than ATI's, which is some justification for the slower speed. NVIDIA assures me that there is a lot of room for improving the fragment program performance with improved driver compiler technology.
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The guys at Tech Report also has an article in which they dissect parts of the benchmark and provide what both FutureMark and nVidia's comments on the matter.
IF you've run the benchmark, post your scores here, and we'll all compare.
Or you could just go directly to the futuremark forums instead.
Here is a great paper on the subject. The site is down, but Google has a cache of it.
A quote:
"Michael M, Editor-in-Chief of PC Magazine was looking at the executive report on the latest graphics benchmarks which were to appear in the June 29th issue. As he got deeper into the summary, his face took on a baffled look. He picked up the phone to call Bill M, Vice President for Technology, and asked him to come by his office with the detailed test results. Five minutes later, they were pouring over the data on Bill's laptop."
Source:
Hercules Cheating
It seems like the 3Dmark folks decided to deliberately test DX9 features, even though there are not many cards which support them in hardware yet. Nvidia is pissed because they have not implemented any DX9 features in hardware on the FX, where ATI has them on the 9x00 whatever.
This is a valid benchmark to use to test out how your current hardware will perform in a DX9 environment. I, for one, am glad to see such a tool available so that I can take DX9 performance into account when making my next video card purchase. So my next card may be an ATI - Who knew? The last ATI product I owned was a Number 9, not exactly a 3D monster....
You think emacs is evil?! You've never used VM's XEDIT have you?!! That's evil, baby!
Read about it here. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=7920
"An Nvidia technical marketing manager confirmed to us that Geforce FX has 4 Pipelines and 2 Texture Memory Units that can results with 8 textures per clock but only in multitexturing.
However, Nvidia did say that there were some cases where its chip can turn out 8 pixels per clock. Here is a quote:
"GeForce FX 5800 and 5800 Ultra run at 8 pixels per clock for all of the following: a) z-rendering b) stencil operations c) texture operations d) shader operations"
and
"Only color+Z rendering is done at 4 pixels per clock"
We talked with many developers and they said me that all games these days use Color + Z rendering. So all this Nvidia talk about the possibility of rendering 8 pixels in special cases becomes irrelevant.
The bottom line is that when it comes to Color + Z rendering, the GeForce FX is only half as powerful as the older Radeon 9700."
This statement is false.
Yes, it does matter (within reason, anyway). While your current card may do well enough at Quake 3 and the new cards may not have a huge margin over it (really, what's the difference between 150fps and 200fps except in the very rare situation where absolutely everything on the screen is blowing up or something), that's old technology. As hardware capabilities increase, software complexity also increases. That card getting you 150fps at 1024x768 in Q3 with 4x FSAA will likely barely break 30fps for Doom 3. (at that point, you tweak -- drop your resolution, turn off FSAA and anisotropic filtering, lower your detail levels, turn off unnecessary effects, etc and get up to a playable 50fps or so) The cards doing 200fps in Q3 will probably run D3 around 50-60fps. While there's little difference between 150-200fps, there's a world of difference between 30 and 60fps.
And just to head off any, "But your eye can only see 24/30/60fps anyway, who needs more?" arguments:
roughly what he's saying is:
If you just write an application then it will run twice as fast on the ati card as the geforce fx
But if you write two applications to to the same thing and optimize one for the ati card and the other for the nvidia card then the nvidia card does better
So performance wise nvidia appear to be relying on developers to optimise their applications specificaly for the geforce fx. And they probably will get it too given their current market share.