ATi RADEON XPRESS 200 Series: AMD Platform Chipsets
The Cinebench 2003 benchmark is an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test, based on the commercially available Cinema 4D application. This is a multithreaded, multiprocessor aware benchmark that renders a single 3D scene and tracks the length of the entire process. The time it took each test system to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below (listed in seconds). We ran two sets of numbers, one in single-thread mode, and another in the benchmark's multithread mode for our Hyper-Threading-enabled P4 test systems. The Athlons are only capable of running the single thread test, hence the "WNR"s in the graph below.
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Using the integrated graphics processor had a minimal impact on performance in the Cinebench 2003 rendering test. All four of the AMD powered systems, regardless of whether they was using a motherboard based on the RADEON XPRESS 200 or nForce 3 Ultra chipsets, performed at near identical levels.
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Next up, we used the KribiBench benchmark produced by Adept Development. KribiBench is an SSE aware software renderer. A 3D model is rendered and animated by the host CPU, and the average frames per second are reported. We used two of the included models with this benchmark: an Office model consisting of 42,000 polygons and an absolutely gargantuan "Ultra" model that comprises over 16 million polygons!
Score another victory for the RADEON XPRESS 200's IGP. In the less intensive Office Model test, when using the IGP, the RADEON XPRESS 200 decisively beat the other AMD powered systems. This is most likely due to ATi's drivers having a beneficial impact on performance here. When testing with the extremely large Ultra Model, performance on the AMD based systems leveled out with the RADEON XPRESS 200 and nForce 3 Ultra performing at virtually the same level, whether the IGP was used or not.
