FarCry Performance Revisited: ATI Strikes Back with Sh 2b

I don't know, it looks the same, but I guess someone have to investigate this to be sure, I wonder if they do the same path!

 

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8389&highlight=mixed

Has the number of paths changed from this?

The second FP16/FP32 mixed mode has now been removed?

So the FX 59X0 boards now run the 8.1/PS1.4 path?

 

next spring we'll talk about how each hardware is rounding the 24th bit

 

Yes, yes and yes.

 

Ta for the reply .. Always thought FP16 was < DX9.

US

 

Frankly I think it was Kristof that had predicted on these forums that it'll turn into another 16/22/32bpp colour depth alike debacle (think Voodoo times), but I can fairly say that it has gotten even worse.

Mixed floating point precision is not a panacea; pure FP32 is in terms of bandwidth though and I suspect it'll remain so for quite some time.

 

It be interesting if the r420 sieres turns out to be faster than the nv40 series in 3dmark2005 .


Would it again be who cares we don't play 3dmark from the nvidia camp like when nvidia was cheating in it ? Or will nvidia cheat in it again and the nvidia camp claim that its okay to cheat .

 

Or if the NV40 series is faster.....

I doubt that we'll see any cheating from any of the IHV's though. But i'm guessing that we'll see a lot of excuses from the loosing side. If there is such a thing. 3D Mark 2003 seems to be pretty even.

 

it wont be a big about face as the nv40 is already faster in 3dmark 2003 (though it may be cheating after daves comments about a compiler that will beat any changes done by futuremark). Don't see any ati fans bashing it right now. So i don't excpect we will in the future .

 

What I would like to know if future control center will feature a "optimize 3DMark" option.

 

If the compiler can beat any changes that FM does then aren't we talking about a generic optimization ?

3D Mark 2003 is old news and there are games out now which are better, or at least more interesting benchmarks (Doom 3, CS stress test, Far Cry). Besides, the difference isn't anything to talk about either.

 

Next 3dmark could be a hot topic again if some rumors are true.

 

Not if they are ignoring changes to the shaders and using some other hook to execute their own code from the drivers. There's nothing generic about faking a benchmark.

 

That should be really easy to detect though.

 

Well

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=361734#361734


Everytime we bust them they just get better at hiding stuff.

Personaly shader replacements are a good thing except when comparing two cards .

If card a is faster with out optimizations to a game and game b is just as fast with the optimizations but without is slower. The consumer should know that. Because not every title is going to have that work put into it and mods or any updates can break it.

 

id wager that the nv40 will be faster.

 

If clocked equally, NV40 would open up a can on R420.

 

Before DX9 there was simply no FPxx in the programmable pixel pipeline. Everything was some sort of fixed point precision. PS1.x cards had 8 bits of mantissa precision, plus the sign bit. ATI's implementation of PS1.4 allowed the same precision, but more range. Instead of a range of [-1,1], they had [-8,8].

EDIT: To clear up more on precision. . . FP24 is the minimum for full precision in PS2.0 (and probably PS2.0_extended). For PS3.0, full precision must be FP32. Partial precision is a minimum of FP16 for all DX9 shader models. HLSL also specifies a double precision (minimum of FP64), though like partial precision, there is no requirement to support it (personally, I think it'd be more useful in the vertex pipeline).

 

Ye that's what I thought .. I guess I just forgot the partial percision thing.

US

 

But they don't clock equally, do they? Probably one of the reasons why ATI left out SM3.0 was so that they would have that clock speed advantage.