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DX9 Capable for OpenGL
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| ATi FireGL X1 DX9 Capable for OpenGL | |
| (Review by MS, Oct 15, 2003) |
Conclusions
Professional graphics cards are expensive and benchmarking them is extremely tedious (using FRAPS) and not very gratifying. There are numerous other professional graphics benchmarks out there that we did not use for a number of reasons, either they are proprietary (Catia) and require licensing of the benchmark program for an unsum of money. There are other benchmarks that don't show anything beyond what we have already shown, so why bother. We used to use Caligari public bench 4.12 but since Caligari has been less than cooperative with respect to support and, moreover, the variations within different runs of the benchmark exceeded the tolerable, we finally dropped it.
Winners and Not-So Winners
There is no clear-cut winner coming out of this review and we never intended to crown one either. The results, however, show certain tendencies and preferences, certainly, models of lower to moderate size are where the FireGL-X1 is thriving or simply outperforming the competition. In many ways, the FireGL got the short end of the stick here since its DX9 capabilities never had a chance to bear fruit over either competitor, yet, this is where the major forte of the FireGL X1 would be. There are no benchmarks, though, to show and tell.
Of the three cards tested here, the FireGL X1 is probably the best all-around card, followed by the Quadro4 980XGL, which, in spite of its age, showed absolutely splendid performance. What the Quadro family of professional graphics adapters has going for itself are the drivers along with some other features like the earlier-mentioned dynamic allocation of frame buffer to texture or geometry. In 3ds max, the Maxtreme drivers appeared a bit too optimized for their own good but we don't want to rehash any of the stuff floating around in the consumer card space.
Overall, it appears that in the entry-level professional graphics card market, the FireGL X1 is an extremely competitive card but on the other hand, more money will buy more performance as we are just experiencing with the nVidia Quadro FX3000. We will have more on that shortly, stay tuned.
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