Futuremarks technical response

Already tried that....nVidia backed out...chicken sh*ts!

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5912

 

Seriously I don't understand the comments towards Canadians sometimes, I look at the US and Canada as partners...we are very much alike...alot of History.
I work for a Huge American based company, and travel to the US alot and in the end we all want the same thing and work towards the same goals.

 

How about a game of cricket? Or crocket!! Maybe NVIDIA would be happiest with a Crochet competition.. OK I'll stop now...

 

I missed that..

 

Dave, it is good that you give such a candid account of your conversation with Nvidia reps. I very much appreciate your input, but for your sake are you not afraid of causing ... grief with that particular IHV or no?

This actually coninsides with a quote I read out of THG sometime ago, this seems to be a reoccurring theme. I have read other accounts suggesting the same thing. :? It really looks as this statement from Omid Rahmat is more true then I had originally thought.

http://www4.tomshardware.com/smoke/20010601/ati-06.html

 

DaveBaumann wrote:

Dave, just out of curiosity, what games are on the "big list"?

 

It's all in good fun No one really (well, no one I know anyway) takes these jokes seriously.

 

Yes, Inquiring minds want to know...

 

I had a shirt from the Folger's library in DC with that quote on it. Used to get me dirty looks in the legal department of Speedway SuperAmerica's corporate office when I worked there years ago. 8)

 

Based on my results. If the pixel shader is the limiting factor, the fps should have increased much more when disabling it.

No Txt means there will never be any texture set to dx9's "settexture", so the driver could ignore/optimize the txt reads and no coloring is made.

There is a line at the bottom of there test, where I say something like this: The actual limitation factor (vs, ps, fillrate) depends also much on the graphics hardware and the r9700 pro is taken as a baseline for future dx9 cards, because 3dmakr03 is a dx9 benchmark.

Thats true, but we didn't know before that 3dmark03 is that heavy fillrate limited. I meant "most of the time" in 320x200 only, in higher resolutions it's more fillrate (except test 1) limited than anything else.

Right, I would love the have a radeon 9500 / 9500 pro. The radeon softmod should work in the other direction r9700->r9500, I'll see what I can do.

Thomas

 

I dont know if it will help I underclocked my 9700pro I dont know if the scores will help at all.

320x200 VGA Memory Clock 258 MHz
VGA Core Clock 275 MHz
3DMark Score 8 K3DMarks
GT1 - Wings of Fury 195.9 fps
GT2 - Battle of Proxycon 77.8 fps
GT3 - Troll's Lair 56.1 fps
GT4 - Mother Nature 34.4 fps
Vertex Shader 13.0 fps
Pixel Shader 2.0 101.4 fps
Ragtroll 30.7 fps

1024x768mem 258 MHz
VGA Core Clock 275 MHz
3DMark Score 4012 3DMarks
GT1 - Wings of Fury 143.2 fps
GT2 - Battle of Proxycon 25.7 fps
GT3 - Troll's Lair 24.0 fps
GT4 - Mother Nature 22.9 fps
Vertex Shader 12.7 fps
Pixel Shader 2.0 34.4 fps
Ragtroll 16.8 fps

software VS 320x200
3DMark Score 1721 3DMarks
GT1 - Wings of Fury 64.3 fps
GT2 - Battle of Proxycon 17.2 fps
GT3 - Troll's Lair 9.3 fps
GT4 - Mother Nature 4.7 fps
Vertex Shader 2.3 fps
Pixel Shader 2.0 13.4 fps
Ragtroll 6.4 fps
:edit I can put the reg scores at default clocks if needed also:

 

I think Chinese checkers would be more appropriate for Mssrs. Ho & Huang. 8)

 

+1

 

So, we both agree that pixel shading is not a significantly limiting factor (in the GT 2 and GT 3 tests) for the 9700, but it may possibly be so for the benchmark? And that we have yet to determine if it is for the benchmark, but observing differences between the 9500 non pro and 9000 pro (we want as apples to apples as we can get...namely 4x1 and 128-bit bus, so a 9500 pro does not enter into this question about pixel shading, and perhaps we might want to turn off Hyper Z features) would be a better basis for observing whether the benchmark is useful for testing this performance than just observing the 9700 (the R300 with all 8 pipelines and a 256-bit bus) compared to itself? Finally, do we agree that we won't know in a final sense whether it is useful for comparing pixel shader performance until comparing to more widely divergent architectures (would most likely have to be slower architectures than the R300 since it already shows little limitation)?

Sorry I missed that text, things are a bit more cramped than I'm used to and I found the translation tricky to decipher in some spots.

That bolded statement is still confusing me. Let me quote what I was replying to initially:

Talking about GT 1 specifically:

The default test resolution is 1024x768. Framerate drops significantly as it is increased. Thus, why would you say GT 1 is not fillrate limited? Well, you show 320x200 resolution, where it is not. While the default resolution of 1024x768 may be "very high resolution" compared to 320x200, it seems odd to term it the way you did.

Hmm...what I would find interesting, atleast as far as currently available cards go, is a comparison between: 8500/9100 @ 275/275, 9000 Pro (275/275), 9500 non pro (275/275, 128-bit bus), all with 128MB memory. With Hyper Z features turned on and off, at various resolutions and in all tests (well, the first 3 game tests and shader tests). Not very much data in the ORB yet, unfortunately, and it would be a big question mark of system config details and driver settings even if there were.

I also wonder how much "driver telling the GPU to do stuff via the AGP bus" overhead there is and how it the framerate for that compares to the "driver gets told to do nothing" you showed on that system.

 

Joe, seriously, honestly, do you work for Ati?

Instead of sitting here and arguing about 3DMark, how about some of the demo writers here code up a quick benchmark for DX 9.0 using HLSL or Cg so that Dave or Kyle can use it to check out what optimized code can do on Gffx and R300?

 

yes.

Okay, sorry for the confusion. I meant not fillrate limted at all, I meant not as much fillrate limited as the other tests.

yes, would be nice to investigate this isues...

Thomas

 

Because that is not the way its supposed to work. Also you are insinuating that 3dmark03's code is not optomized, or is somehow unworthy.

1. 3dmark03's shader routines were written with HLSL.

2. Code is *supposed* to be optomized for DX8,DX9 or OpenGL. It is then the companies problem if they cant run the damn thing.

Ati is not upset at the methodology used in developing 3dmark. either Sis or Any of the other Beta companies have seen fit to make a public statement. The bottom line is that 3dmark03 comes as close as you can to simulating the condistions in future games.

For a Synthetic benchmark that is all you can ask for.

 

Only in the pixel shader 2.0 test.

 

This is posted @ FM & I copied it for your reading pleasure:

Hope this helps in the understanding of what FM did & why.

just me

 

I think Ed Stroglio summed it up best at www.overclockers.com :-

"It's fair to say there's plenty of hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty to go around in all the pieces. If you think any one of the parties is as pure as the virgin snow, you are biased. "

As I see it nvidia come out badly in the test so disown it
Ati come out well so grab it with two hands.
Futuremark probably wish they had made it less agressive and more cpu dependent, after all they could bring out the SE edition in 1 years time with more polygons to test the current crop of cards more severely then.

I don't see many people entering this "happening" with an objective and neutral viewpoint .