ATI RS780 benchmarks

[swaaye]

A feature was just implemented in the drivers (not sure when this driver will be released to the public) that fixes this issue. The CPU freq. gets locked @ maximum when running any fullscreen OGL or D3D app. This issue only applies to the K8 family though. Phenom and it's derivatives (griffin aka turion X2 ultra) don't suffer from this problem.

This was implemented to work around another issue with K8 cpus that caused some frame drops when the CPU lowered it's pstate during video playback. I noticed during my testing that the workaround is broken though... it locks the cpu minimum state @ 100% and doesn't revert it back. Again this is K8 only, if you had phenom all of these problems would go away. Buy a phenom! lol

Good to know. At least I figured out my own workarounds. heh. I'll probably get a 45nm Phenom for it someday.

 

[swaaye]

Well, remember that it is a unified processor.

Relatively high geometry throughput on a low end card is good because it lets you play newer games at low resolution at the same FPS as high end cards running high resolution. If everything was scaled down, this wouldn't be true.

Yeah that's what I figured. It's putting all 40 SPs into geometry and it's not very bandwidth intensive so zoom it goes! This probably means that the result isn't really all that indicative of any sort of real world performance because these resources are shared with other tasks. The test was more useful when vertex shaders were separate from other computational assets and you were getting a measurement of that separate function. It is entertaining to see what it can do when it shifts everything it has in such a single minded way.

Here's my HD 3870 up against the same HD 3200 results. Same system too, but the CPU and RAM were at different clocks. CPU @ 2400 MHz vs 2300 MHz, not sure of RAM. The low resolution of the default settings (1024x768) is obviously making it very CPU limited. The synth tests are more interesting than most of the others.
Green = HD 3200
Red = HD 3870

Now those geometry results are special. Nature is an embarrassment on 3200 and 3450 from what I've looked up in ORB. A discrete, overclocked 3450 seems to be able to push that up to about 55 fps. That's just a bit more than a Radeon 8500 manages. I really have no idea what I'm talking about, but I wonder if it has to do with overdraw from all of those alpha textures (tree leaves/grass) in the scene.