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| ASUS V9280 A Case Study of AGP 3.0 | |
| (Review by MS, Dec. 9, 2002) |
Unreal Tournament 2003
Aside from theoretical benchmarks what is going to happen in real life games? We took UT2003, set the resolution to 1280 x 1024 and everything else to the highest levels and found no difference whatsoever in the Asbestos Flyby benchmark. The bot matches are mostly CPU intensive and, therefore, there is no point in running them here. We eabled 2 x AA to add some more difficulty and we found ..... nothing.
The new nVidia Drivers have one feature that seems equivalent to the TexTurbo setting we described for the SIS Xabre600 and this feature is called Texture Sharpen. We enabled that feature, even though it may appear counterproductive in that the actual fill rate is dropping to roughly 570 MTexel / sec in both single and multi-texture benchmarks, meaning that the internal bandwidth may put a cap on the performance anyway.
Asbestos Flyby 1280 x 1024 x 32
ASUS V9280S vs. ASUS V8460 (Ti4600) vs. ASUS V8420 (Ti4200). The V9290S was run at either AGP 8X, or 4X (with 8X mode disabled in the BIOS) or with pin# A3 and A11 taped over to force AGP2.0 (4X) mode. The Ti 4600 was run in AGP 4X Mode and with AGP 8X disabled in the BIOS which results in AGP 2X mode. The Ti4200 was run in AGP 4X mode only. The quality setting was on "balanced". There is no difference at all that could correlate to the increased AGP frequency.
Setting the quality slider to "application" slows things down quite a bit but we still don't see any differences
We tried every other possibility, that is AntiAliasing on / off, Texture Sharpening On / Off, "balanced" or "application" and the most we got was the fraction of a percentage point. All in all, we therefore have to conclude that AGP 8X is useless.
Not So Fast
We have looked at a few applications so far and have not seen much of a difference. This may as well mean that the applications we were looking at are thriving on low AGP bandwidth and we could go on a quest and post some 100 more benchmarks. There is, however, something that we did not mention yet and that is the question whether the rationale we were using is actually valid. Everybody is talking about textures when it comes to AGP but there is more to 3D than textures. The prime example is SPEC VievPERF with a huge number of triangles and relatively little texturing. Will this be different from what we have seen so far?
Next Page: => SPEC ViewPerf 7.0 =>
