Roundup: 10 workstation graphics cards! (page 5: Test protocol)

A glimpse of performance levels

We have now been playing with the different graphics cards lent to us by AMD and PNY for a few months. Putting a vast and pertinent test protocol into place to analyse all these cards is a complex process, especially when new solutions are arriving all the time with drivers that are constantly moving the goalposts.

As things stand, many of the tests that we had originally planned still aren’t ready or give inconsistent results. Given how busy the next few weeks are going to be, and so as not to push back publication of other results indefinitely, we have decided to publish a lite version of the test so as to give you a first glimpse of the capacities of all these graphics solutions. We have left out several pieces of CAD and previsualisation software, Adobe Premier Pro CS5 (for which we need to refine our test protocol) and the computing aspect which merits a report all to itself in fact.

For this report, we concentrated on the recent SPECviewperf 11 (64 bits) and, for more practical tests, 3ds Max 2011 and Autodesk’s Maya 2011 64 bits, as well as on the geometric performance of all these cards. To recap, SPECviewperf carries out traces of viewsets taken from graphics applications in OpenGL. We will try to return to this topic with more tests before the end of this year, which will enable us to evaluate the whole of the new Quadro range, which isn’t yet available.

We have tested 10 professional cards in total and added the GeForce GTX 480, GTX 460 and GTX 285 as well as the Radeon HD 5870. We used the latest drivers available, including the recent FirePro drivers which give a significant gain in performance.

Test configuration

Intel Core i7 980X (HT deactiveated)
Asus Rampage III Extreme
6 GB DDR3 1333 Corsair
Windows 7 64 bits
GeForce 260.52 drivers
Quadro 259.12 drivers
Catalyst 10.8 (Radeon)
FirePro 8.76.5 beta drivers