Well, the best thing to do at this point would be to test the triangle setup rate. This implies basically abusing the vertex cache to the maximum, so that the VS idles.
I don't have a framework to do this efficiently right now, and I'm not sure VBO would be best to test this (since it tends to preprocess a bit; if the same triangles came up, perhaps the driver would detect it; but then again it's always possible to use different triangles but you're limited to n*n possibilities then). If nobody feels like bothering, I always could see what I can come up with though...
Honestly, I can't believe NVIDIA saying they improved triangle setup/rasterisation efficiency. These parts must have been pretty much unchanged since the TNT2! Sure, they might have had a revamp or two since then, but there's no reason to redesign them completely for every new generation of GPUs. Which would point towards an asychronous clock rate being used in that area, at least imo.
As for people asking "Why should part of the chip run at 470Mhz, and not all of it?" - from my verry limited understanding of hardware engineering (I'm sure some other members could give a much better answer
), different parts of all chips have different clocking potential. The NetBurst architecture, for example, has some of its ALUs at a much higher clock rate than the rest of the chip, because they were handtuned to support such a high frequency and because ALU design, if done properly, tends to be slightly more tolerant to higher clock rates.
And let me reinsist that I'm talking of Triangle Setup performance here - "geometry tests" wouldn't highlight this, should it be those units that are running at a higher frequency.
Uttar
I don't have a framework to do this efficiently right now, and I'm not sure VBO would be best to test this (since it tends to preprocess a bit; if the same triangles came up, perhaps the driver would detect it; but then again it's always possible to use different triangles but you're limited to n*n possibilities then). If nobody feels like bothering, I always could see what I can come up with though...
Honestly, I can't believe NVIDIA saying they improved triangle setup/rasterisation efficiency. These parts must have been pretty much unchanged since the TNT2! Sure, they might have had a revamp or two since then, but there's no reason to redesign them completely for every new generation of GPUs. Which would point towards an asychronous clock rate being used in that area, at least imo.
As for people asking "Why should part of the chip run at 470Mhz, and not all of it?" - from my verry limited understanding of hardware engineering (I'm sure some other members could give a much better answer
), different parts of all chips have different clocking potential. The NetBurst architecture, for example, has some of its ALUs at a much higher clock rate than the rest of the chip, because they were handtuned to support such a high frequency and because ALU design, if done properly, tends to be slightly more tolerant to higher clock rates.And let me reinsist that I'm talking of Triangle Setup performance here - "geometry tests" wouldn't highlight this, should it be those units that are running at a higher frequency.
Uttar
