nvidia drivers and synthetic benchmarking

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Fri May 08, 2009 3:30 pm

One of my students made the following observation on a piece of coursework I set him. PC3 cannot (at the moment) have a newer driver because for some reason newer drivers makes some of the apps we use on the machine fail to work properly. The 8600GT is an Inno3D card and is cheap and nasty and is horribly underspec even for this particular chipset...

Code: Select all

 			PC1			PC2			PC3	 
Primary Device		NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT	NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX	NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS	 
Width			1024			1024			1024	 
Height			768			768			768	 
Anti-Aliasing Quality	0			0			0	 
Texture Filtering	Optimal			Optimal			Optimal	 
Anisotropic Level	1			1			1	 
Repeat tests		3 times			3 times			3 times	 
Fixed framerate		Off			Off			Off	 
3DMark Score		4091			5522			9884	3DMarks
SM2.0 Score		1930			2425			4598	 
HDR/SM3.0 Score		1818			3336			4720	 
CPU Score		952			951			2128	 
GT1 - Return To Proxy	16.116			20.816			38.035	FPS
GT2 - Firefly Forest	16.050			19.606			38.601	FPS
CPU1 - Red Valley	0.301			0.300			0.671	FPS
CPU2 - Red Valley	0.482			0.482			1.079	FPS
HDR1 - Canyon Flight	16.776			39.412			43.267	FPS
HDR2 - Deep Freeze	19.592			27.314			51.132	FPS
Fill Rate - Single-T	1372.590		3021.088		5135.694	MTexels/s
Fill Rate - Multi-T	6076.186		3019.463		11903.219	MTexels/s
Pixel Shader		187.923			60.075			525.912	FPS
Vertex Shader - Simple	67.067			59.069			221.036	MVertices/s
Vertex Shader - Complex	63.547			79.231			96.471	MVertices/s
Shader Particles(SM3.0)	41.760			60.650			132.419	FPS
Perlin Noise (SM3.0)	65.455			60.031			164.856	FPS
8 Triangles		10.790			10.352			25.841	MTriangles/s
32 Triangles		42.627			40.744			85.508	MTriangles/s
128 Triangles		114.055			83.879			243.944	MTriangles/s
512 Triangles		124.043			83.975			253.102	MTriangles/s
2048 Triangles		128.382			125.932			255.370	MTriangles/s
32768 Triangles		129.354			125.960			255.827	MTriangles/s
CPU			Intel(R) P4 CPU 3.20GHz	Intel(R) P4 CPU 3.20GHz	Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz	 
Internal Clock		3189			3192			2395	MHz
External Clock		800			800			266	MHz
Display Device		NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT	NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX	NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS	 
Total Local Video Mem	512			768			640	MB
Driver Version		6.14.11.8122		6.14.11.7824		6.14.11.6371	 
Total Physical Memory	2032			2032			2032	MB

From this test the data shows that the performance difference between the PC's. However what is more interesting is that PC 1 has better performance in some aspects:
-	Fill Rate - Multi-Texturing.
-	Pixel Shader.
-	Vertex Shader – Simple.
-	Perlin Noise (SM3.0).

Apologies for the cocked up formatting - I did try and sort it out but the tabs aren't playing inside the [ ]s

Thoughts?

_ds_ · Post by **_ds_** » Fri May 08, 2009 3:38 pm

You forgot glxgears.

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Fri May 08, 2009 4:15 pm

I didn't - he did - it's a masters level degree - we guide - we don't lead...

Diziet Sma · Post by **Diziet Sma** » Sat May 09, 2009 3:15 am

Interestingly enough, whilst recently searching the net when I found my Kubuntu 8.04 doesn't have glxgears installed, I came across the following snippet of useless trivia. (cannot currently verify the truth of this, however)

Amusingly enough, another, much longer switch for glxgears to do the same as -printfps is

glxgears -iacknowledgethatthistoolisnotabenchmark

Website · Post by **DaddyHoggy** » Sat May 09, 2009 8:50 am

_ds_ · Post by **_ds_** » Sun May 10, 2009 1:34 am

Diziet Sma wrote:
Interestingly enough, whilst recently searching the net when I found my Kubuntu 8.04 doesn't have glxgears installed,

mesa-utils.

I came across the following snippet of useless trivia. (cannot currently verify the truth of this, however)

Amusingly enough, another, much longer switch for glxgears to do the same as -printfps is

glxgears -iacknowledgethatthistoolisnotabenchmark

You won't unless you download an older version. Both of those disappeared before Mesa 7.0 was released.

Diziet Sma · Post by **Diziet Sma** » Sun May 10, 2009 1:59 am

_ds_ wrote:
Diziet Sma wrote:
Interestingly enough, whilst recently searching the net when I found my Kubuntu 8.04 doesn't have glxgears installed,
mesa-utils.

Yes, so I discovered after much hunting around. It's been removed from the package (I forget which one) that it had always been a part of before.

_ds_ wrote:
Diziet Sma wrote:
I came across the following snippet of useless trivia. (cannot currently verify the truth of this, however)

Amusingly enough, another, much longer switch for glxgears to do the same as -printfps is

glxgears -iacknowledgethatthistoolisnotabenchmark

You won't unless you download an older version. Both of those disappeared before Mesa 7.0 was released.

Ok, thanks for that... bummer, I thought that was quite funny..