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HOW WE
CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM:
We tested the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra, and the GeForce FX
5950 Ultra and ATi Radeon 9800 XT, on an i875P based
DFI LANPARTY Pro875B motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium 4
3.2CGHz CPU. The first thing we did when configuring this
test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "High
Performance Defaults". Then we set the memory to operate at
200MHz (in dual-channel mode), with the CAS Latency and other
memory timings set by the SPD, and then we set the AGP aperture size
to 256MB. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP
Professional with SP1 was installed. When the installation
was complete, we installed the Intel chipset drivers and
hit the Windows Update site to download and install all
of the available updates. Then we installed all of the
necessary drivers for the rest of our components and removed Windows
Messenger from the system altogether. Auto-Updating, System Restore, and Drive Indexing were then
disabled, the hard drive was de-fragmented and a
768MB permanent page file was created. Lastly, we set
Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance", installed
the benchmarking software and ran all of the tests.
Throughout our testing, NVIDIA's and ATi's drivers were
configured for maximum visual quality. Their
respective "Fastest" or "Performance" modes were not used.
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HotHardware's Test Setup |
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Intel
Powered - 3.2GHz System |
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Hardware: Processor -
Mainboard -
Video Cards -
Memory -
Audio -
Hard Drive -
Optical Drive -
Other -
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Intel Pentium 4
3.2GHz
DFI LANPARTY Pro875B
i875P "Canterwood" Chipset
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra
ATi Radeon 9800 XT
1024MB Kingston HyperX PC3500
CAS 2
Integrated C-Media Audio
Western Digital "Raptor"
36GB - 10,000RPM - SATA
Lite-On 16X DVD-ROM
3.5" Floppy Drive
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Software:
Operating System -
Chipset Drivers -
DirectX -
Video Drivers -
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Windows XP Professional SP1 (Fully
Patched)
Intel INF v5.1.1.1002
DirectX 9.0b
NVIDIA Forceware v60.72
ATI Catalyst v4.4
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Performance Comparisons
With ShaderMark v2.0 (Build 1e) |
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Strict High Level Shading Language |
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ShaderMark v2.0
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For most of our recent
reviews, we've stuck to using games, or benchmarks based
on actual game engines, to test video cards. The
problem with using this approach, is that some advanced
3D features may not be fully tested, because game
engines sometimes tend to lack the newest features available with
cutting edge graphics hardware. In an effort to
reveal raw shader performance, which is nearly
impossible to do with the games on the market today,
we've incorporated ToMMTi-System's ShaderMark v2.0 into
our benchmarking suite. ShaderMark is a Direct 9.0
pixel shader benchmark that exclusively uses code written
in Microsoft?s High Level Shading Language (HLSL). |
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Detailed ShaderMark v2.0 Results
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ShaderMark
v2.0 attempts to run 22 different shaders of varying
complexity, hence the extremely large graph above.
Please note that some of the shaders would not run on the
NVIDIA powered cards, because floating point texture shaders
aren't supported yet in NVIDIA's Forceware driver package.
For the visual learners reading this, it's clear that the
GeForce 6800 Ultra offers massive performance improvements
for shaders written in HLSL. The Radeon 9800 XT
significantly outperformed the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, but
the GeForce 6800 Ultra was simply in a league of its own.
The table to the left is the exact ShaderMark v2.0
performance breakdown between the three cards tested here.
When compared to NVIDIA's previous flagship part, the
GeForce 6800 Ultra outperformed it by a minimum of 347.8%
and by as much 520%. The ATi Radeon 9800 XT fared much
better, but it too wasn't even competitive. The
GeForce 6800 Ultra's performance advantages over the 9800 XT
ranged from a minimum of 47% to a maximum of 194.1%.
It seems NVIDIA took the NV3x's shortcomings to heart and
made enormous strides with the NV40. Its shader
performance in vastly improved.
Aquamark 3 & Halo
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