Slashdot Mirror
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.
Now, it's the video card makers slagging the benchmark makers.
Anybody remember the early 90s (93?) when Hercules got itself into hot water by hard-coding a super-fast result for the PC Magazine video benchmark? Whoo hoo, that made for some good press. Got their awards pulled and everything.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
There are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks.
NVidia missed a manufacturing cycle and now it's coming back to haunt them. They really need to drop the FX and concentrate on whatever new architecture is currently being tossed around in R&D.
Originally I was planning to buy the successor to the NV30 for a great experience in Quake III and better framerates in older games. But now it looks like I'll be laying out the dough on whatever ATI brings out early next year.
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...
My Apple ][+ doesn't have enough disk space to download this program. Can someone help me out?
Trolling is a art,
voltron:/home/gannoc/incoming/temp# chmod +x 3dmark2003.exep # ./3dmark2003.exe ./3dmark2003.exe: cannot execute binary file
voltron:/home/gannoc/incoming/tem
bash:
With the level of complexity in current hardware, I can't imagine anyone will come up with a benchmark that -can't- be labelled as skewed, inaccurate, or 'not giving justice'.
If I spend a million dollars developing a cool board that does zillions of sprigmorphs a second (a made up metric), and someone does a benchmark that doesn't test sprigmorph rendering, does that mean my board sucks? No, it just means the benchmark doesn't check it.
However, if Competitor B makes a board that doens't have sprigmorph rendering, but scores higher on this benchmark, which is the 'better card'?
The days of simple benchmarks, alas, are past. It used to be "how many clock cycles a second". Nowadays, whether one piece of hardware is better than another simply comes down to "Can it do what I'm doig right now any faster or cheaper than another unit?"
Event Management Solutions : http://www.stonekeep.com/
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.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
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.
Along with most of my geek friends, I really depend on excellent the "excellent" 3dMark scores of the latest and greatest hardware to drive down the price of the previous generation of video cards. After all, software that truly supports all of the whiz-bang features of the top-tier cards doesn't arrive until about 6-9 months after the cards appear on Best Buy's shelves.
If 3DMark isn't producing high enough scores for the new nVidia cards, where will my price breaks be?
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.
Sometimes people scratch their heads about benchmarks and wonder "how did they come up with that number?" If the benchmark itself was Open Source you'd have at least a partial answer. Not to mention you'd have the eyes of many people looking over the code to make sure it was executing draws in the right and consistent manner.
So why aren't benchmarks open? What do the makers of benchmarks have to hide? Are they under NDAs from the card vendors?
What do you mean? Mine's out.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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:
now nvidia are introducing a new factor in the equation: now you have to write different code for each videocard. just as there used to be 3dfx-only games.
isn't this against the idea of directx? seems very counterproductive to me, and an attempt by nvidia to monopolize the gaming industry.
Hostes alienigieni me abduxerunt. Qui annus est?
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.
nVidia needs to learn that you can stay alive as a company with the #2 video card, as long as you can price it competitively - hell, that's what ATI did for years. But they do need to make sure they eventually get a winner. Since FX obviously ain't it, maybe they can win one next year. And making better decisions is part of it - don't skimp on pixel shaders like 1.4 when the competition will be able to kill you with it.
They definitely need to catch back up to ATI - competition on this front is good for all of us.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat