Pixel Shader performances
We tested two relatively simple lighting shaders that represent a good compromise between the views of theoretical and practical calculations power:
The GeForce 8800 destroys the competition. Note that unlike the GeForce 7, its performances do not drop in FP32 even if, according to NVIDIA, it could be faster with FP16 in specific cases. As explained before, if thanks to its architecture there isn’t too large a latency to mask, it has a huge quantity of registers. The lack of registers is the main cause of the performance gap between the FP16 and FP32 for the previous models of NVIDIA GPUs.
Vertex Shader performances
We have tested the T&L, VS 1.1, VS 2.0 and VS 3.0 performances with RightMark :
Thanks to the unified architecture, the GeForce 8800 can attribute all its resources to the processing of vertex shaders. This leads to possible performances improvements. The results measured could have been even higher, but the GPU is not limited in these tests by the computing power. The results obtained, however, were high enough to crush the competition.
Texture access performances
We measured the performances of access to textures of various formats and sizes with and without filtering. As the texture is displayed in full screen (1920 x 1440) the access to big textures is actually outside of the limits of the full cache texture efficiency.
There is the GeForce 8800...and then the others
Click
here to take a look at the results.
