Workstation Graphics: AGP Cross Section 2004
by Derek Wilson on December 23, 2004 4:14 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Doom 3 Performance
Game engine performance is not particularly important for the sake of gaming on workstation cards. It is, however, important for game developers. We wanted to benchmark some game development applications such as RenderWare Studio. Unfortunately, we haven't been able to come up with a suitable benchmark for such an application yet.As luck may have it, though, game developers usually end up using development tools that run the game engine for display. This makes game tests a useful substitute for the quality of game specific development tools. In other words, developers who adopt the Doom 3 engine will need to be running a system that can perform acceptably under the Doom 3 game engine if they want their development tools to run well.
And so, we bring you Doom 3 running on workstation graphics cards for the game development professional.
As expected, the consumer level cards outperform the workstation class cards in this test. The Quadro FX 4000 is able to push very acceptable frame rates under Doom 3 at 1600x1200. The ATI FireGL X3-256 gets by with about 30fps, but the Wildcat Realizm 200 performs abysmally at 5.4 fps. The picture quality is perfect, but the speed is horrendous.
We had hoped that the Realizm 200 would be able to handle a game based around the OpenGL API. Doom 3 performance is likely pushing the z/stencil capabilities of the Realizm 200 beyond what it is able to handle.
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DerekWilson - Thursday, December 23, 2004 - link
johnsonx,thanks for the suggestion. we're definitly exploring options for other workstation articles.
since this is the first of the graphics workstation articles we've tackled in quite a while, we wanted to start with current technology (R4xx, NV4x, and WC Realizm based parts). There aren't curently lower end parts (with the exception of the Wildcat Realizm 100) based on the technology we tested for this article.
thanks again. let us know if there's anything else we can look into doing for future reviews.
Derek Wilson
johnsonx - Thursday, December 23, 2004 - link
How about benchmarking some of the lower Quadro and FireGL cards? ATI has the FireGL 9600 (aka FireGL T2-128), FireGL 9700 (aka FireGL X1), and FireGL 9800 (aka FireGL X2-256t) at $250, $500 and $600 price points repectively. Comparable Quadros are available as well.For many professional uses, a workstation class card (with attendant workstation class, certified drives) is desired, but ultra-high performance isn't important. It'd be nice to see the comparitive performance of the lower end cards.
DerekWilson - Thursday, December 23, 2004 - link
ksherman,You may have some luck with the 6600gt under AutoCAD, espeically if you don't intend to push the graphics subsystem as much as we did (no AA lines, less tess, etc...), but depending on the Pro/E workload, you may have trouble.
The SPECviewperf veiwset tests a much larger workload than the OCUS benchmark. If you're working with smaller data, you should be fine, but if we're talking millions of verts, you're going to have increasing ammounts of trouble with a 128MB card.
Derek Wilson
ksherman - Thursday, December 23, 2004 - link
You guys should throw in a few mainstream graphics cards for comparison. I am trying to build a systems whos primary use will be with Pro/Engineer and AutoCAD and i certainly do not have the money for a $1000+ video card. Im just wondering how the other cards match up (like the 6600gt AGP)Speedo - Thursday, December 23, 2004 - link
Nice review!