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Platform Comparisons Continued (VI)

Light-05

Remember the Fiasko for the AMD platforms in Lightscape-04? Adding a bit here and there in form of progressive refinement seems to add more demand for FPU power compared to just shading the wiremesh which appears more integer intensive. In other words, it looks like there is an additional handicap for the P4 whereas the Athlons have a bone thrown their way, at least according to the fps scores.

compared to the Lightscape-04 distribution of scores, both AMD systems do exceptionally well in Light05, even though the benchmarks look very similar.

Design Pro Engineer

One of the very most demanding CAD applications with up to 5.9 milion vertices again shows the advantages of high memory bandwidth.

UGS-01

Unigraphics' Engine model once again pushes the VIA KT333 Athlon in front of the SIS 650 / P4 combination.

Ok, so we know about what the FireGL8800 is capable of in industrial Open GL animations and once again, it is necessary to emphasize that there are 3D rendering applications that don't rely on "real-time" fast rendering but are way more complex and that is where the ranking would revert to the opposite, however, since those applications do not depend on the graphics adapter, we are not going to cover them in this review.

In contrast to many of the high-end professional cards, the FireGL is fully DX8.1 enabled and, thus, qualifies as what might be described as the "missing link between gaming and professional graphics cards", albeit with all drawbacks of any "One -size-fits-all" solutions. Let's take a quick look at the gaming capabilities in both OpenGL and D3D environments.

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