8800GTX Shadermark results

Cat AI on high foces AFR and texture filtering optimisations.
I see no reason to believe there are shader replacements going on. In normal games the single card tests show bigger gains with CatAI on high.

 

It is my understanding that setting Cat A.I too "on" when using Crossfire turns on their profile system for AFR rendering. Some of those Crossfire scores are increased by over 130%, and I doubt that has anything to do with shader replacement.

 

Well, just for the fun, change "FEARXP" to "FEAR" with a single card (ATIXxxx), you well be amazed

 

Everyone's saying the GPU is limited by the CPU, but, is the nvidia driver written to take advantage of the quad core from intel (or even dualcore)?

 

Didn't nVidia write dual-core 'optimizations' or something into their drivers a number of moons ago? Not sure if it was just dual-core, or multi-core though.. perhaps somebody else remembers better

And as an aside, does anyone know how much impact, if any, the CPU will have on the ShaderMark results?

 

Nvidia is using multi-threaded code only for the OGL path in their driver, AFAIK -- it offloads the driver calls to a separate thread, which isn't a big issue as the driver overhead for this API is much less than D3D, anyway.

On the topic, the good and not so old R580 is still showing some respectable numbers in here.
But just wait to see the SLi-ed GTX graphzilla numbers.

 

Can we say going into multicore will not help in DX? Only increasing clock speed?

 

No, multicore helps in D3D too. Just not as much right now. nVidia's current drivers are optimized for multicore in both D3D and OpenGL.

 

Glad to read that [for D3D] -- now all it's left is to feel it... somehow.

 

Well, if you want to try, you can always disable the optimizations and see what the difference is. Instructions are in the driver release notes, on page 25 in the PDF for the latest version (93.71).

 

So, for the laymen among us, how do the results rank against the latest-and-greatest of current-gen cards?

 

Check BlizzardOne's handy chart a page back. You can't miss it, just look for the colors that aren't shades of blue.

 

Hardly, the 8800gtx is like close to twice as fast .
Only looks bad for a per clock deal, as isnt the 8800gtx supposed to have like 128 alus or something like that?

 

I wonder if these coming cards will have ATI and NV on a similar level of shader performance. R580 was stupidly ahead of G71. Sure to be fun!

 

It was? Where? I only remember it being significantly ahead when dealing with floating-point textures and dynamic branching. I don't think it was ahead that much in general shader performance.

 

Not according to the B3D Rightmark numbers. Most people understandably bought into the "triple the shader powar!!" hype but G71 held its own typical shader usage. R580's threading and latency hiding mechanisms probably contributed significantly to performance.

 

Well reading the GPGPU stuff convinced me that G71 was not R580's equal at all in shader math. But hey, I guess that could be as you said and that its advantages are just those specific tasks. Its advantages didn't really show up much in games, that's for sure.

On the other hand, hopefully we'll see something more potent at the mid-range than the sad RV530 and disappointing RV560.

 

GPGPU is typically heavy on floating point I/O, and that really hurt nVidia's performance. It doesn't look like an issue on the G8x now, though.