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Running the Create! on the SS7 platform somehow raised the suspicion that, despite the overall more than adequate performance, the scalability might not go very far when pairing the card with a real high end system. In other words, where is the threshold beyond which there is no further increase in performance, regardless of the additional CPU power feeding it. Again, this question cannot be answered in one sentence, simply because it strongly depends on the application. Needless to say that the image quality is not affected by a more powerful CPU but what about the 3D performance?

D3D gaming

Incoming

Like no other Direct3D application, Incoming gets a tremendous boost from the overwhelming FPU power of the AMD Athlon processor. Using the Matrox G400 and the Diamond Viper 770 Ultra, it is no problem to achieve average frame rates in the high 170ies up to 185, which are roughly twice the performance obtainable on the K6-III. The Create! however, gets stuck at 92 fps, showing only some 11% increase over the SS7 platform. Admittedly, though, 90 fps are still way faster than anything even remotely playable so there is not really a problem for gaming.

A similar picture is seen in 3DMark 99 Max. While the CPUMark scores a whopping 12350 (optimized version), the actual 3Dmark score of 4860 (average) lags about 30% behind the competition (Viper: ca 7070, G400: ca 6800). Still, in absolute numbers, there is no reason to complain, particularly since the image quality is the best of all cards tested.

In Final Reality, a rather strange phenomenon occurred. The entire test was running smoothly until the credit screen, there things became choppy. Interestingly, the temporary stalling occurred on the scrolling text screen only, whereas, as soon as the pendulum appeared, things were running again smooth as silk.

The scores are on par with the Viper 770 with the caveat that the extremely high bus transfer rate of 9.7 boosted by 3D transfer rates of 220 MB/sec or 18.76 Reality Marks may be artificially high. Interesting here is also the rather low fill rate of only 78 Mpixels/sec which drags the overall 3D performance down. One has to keep in mind here, though that high fill rates are not the strong domain of the Create! since the Permedia3 chip is clearly geared towards precision geometric operations. High fill rates or lack thereof, however, also largely determine frame rates in application like Incoming. Therefore, it appears as if the bottleneck were right here.

Unreal

Unreal runs perfectly smooth up to a resolution of 800 x 600, regardless of the color depth. Interestingly enough, however, once again there is hardly any performance increase over the SS7 platform. At 1024 x 768 the timedemo starts running a bit choppy but nothing serious. On the other hand, in real gaming applications, the minor choppyness observed on the K6-III when turning (high texture transfer) has completely disappeared.

In Unreal, the limited scalability of the Create! prevents the power of the Athlon to push the Create! to frame rates

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