LOSTCIRCUITS

Maya 7.0 PLE (Phoenix Exerciser)

Originally, this benchmark was supplied by 3DLabs since it takes advantage of the local frame buffer on the graphics card that the Wildcat VP990 had a whopping 512 MB of and, moreover, requires some programmability of the pixel shader units lacking from the older generation of ATI FireGL and nVidia Quadro4 cards. In short, a sequence of 200 frames simulating the spontaneous combustion of a flying stick of wood is rendered to generate a CGI version of fire and billowing smoke, which arguably is quite impressive. Originally, we ran the sequence on Maya 5.0 PLE (the demo only runs on the PLE version), however, we upgraded to the latest download (7.0 PLE) to take advantage of the higher efficiency of the new version. One problem with this is that the older benchmarks obtained with the Quadro 4 980XGL, the FireGL X1 and the Wildcat VP990 are not directly comparable because the new version of Maya renders the sequence more than twice as fast than the originally used 5.0 edition.

Results for the FireGL X1, the Quadro4 980 XGL and Wildcat VP990 were obtained using AW Maya 5.0 PLE, the same goes for the 120 sec results for the FX4500. Upgrading to version 7.0 pushed the QuadroFX4500 to ~ 50 sec, a value that we are using here as reference for the performance of the Quadro FX1400. As it turns out, Phoenix really seems to push the graphics card more than anything, the Quadro FX 4500 is amost 3 times as fast as the FX1400.

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