Friday, March 19th 2010
NVIDIA Claims Upper Hand in Tessellation Performance
A set of company slides leaked to the press reveals that NVIDIA is claiming the upper hand in tessellation performance. With this achievement, NVIDIA is looking to encourage leaps in geometric detail, probably in future games that make use of tessellation. NVIDIA's confidence comes from the way its GF100 GPU is designed (further explained here). Each GF100 GPU physically has 16 Polymorph Engines, one per streaming multiprocessor (SM) which helps in distributed, parallel geometry processing. Each Polymorph Engine has its own tessellation unit. With 15 SMs enabled on the GeForce GTX 480 and 14 on the GeForce GTX 470, there are that many independent tessellation units.
NVIDIA demonstrated its claims in the presentation using the Unigine Heaven, where the GeForce GTX 480 was pitted against a Radeon HD 5870. In many scenes where tessellation is lower, the GPUs performed neck-and-neck, with the GTX 480 performing better more often. But in scenes with heavy tessellation (particularly the "dragon" scene, where a highly detailed model of a dragon needs to be rendered with densely tessellated meshes, the GTX 480 clocks nearly a 100% performance increment over the HD 5870. NVIDIA has been confident about the tessellation performance back since January, when it detailed the GF100 architecture. The GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards will be unveiled on the 26th of March.
Images Courtesy: Techno-Labs
NVIDIA demonstrated its claims in the presentation using the Unigine Heaven, where the GeForce GTX 480 was pitted against a Radeon HD 5870. In many scenes where tessellation is lower, the GPUs performed neck-and-neck, with the GTX 480 performing better more often. But in scenes with heavy tessellation (particularly the "dragon" scene, where a highly detailed model of a dragon needs to be rendered with densely tessellated meshes, the GTX 480 clocks nearly a 100% performance increment over the HD 5870. NVIDIA has been confident about the tessellation performance back since January, when it detailed the GF100 architecture. The GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards will be unveiled on the 26th of March.
145 Comments on NVIDIA Claims Upper Hand in Tessellation Performance
So their effective 100% boost can be cut down 30% by the use of the new Heaven benchmark, plus the new drivers ATI is releasing 10-20%, and the ability to overclock most 5870 by at least 20%.
So this is Nvidias fancy way of saying by using selective math we can bend numbers our way, all day. Just like I could say.
Available DX11 Video card manufacturers.
ATI
So ATI has the fastest DX11 video card on the market in any and all configurations.
performance in heaven with my 5870 and 10.3's is now a lot smoother, never dips below 30 FPS.
Confused marketing.
I will stick with ATI as far as the eye can see. Nvidia will not get my business, not after their 7900GTX debacle vista driver and memory 2D sync issues and never fessing up to it. They took my money then and will not take it again. Plus everyone knows they cheat with benchmarks. :D
I am very happy with my HD5850 thank you that is green and runs cool...:)
GA-EP45-UD3P Rev 1.6
Q9550 E0 @ 4.2~Ghz 1.37v~ 1.34v Under Load
Swiftech Water Cooling
2x2Gb OCZ DDR2 1150Mhz @ 1188MHz 5,5,5,18 @ 2.0v
XTX 5870 @ 1GHz / 1200
3x Western Digital RE3 320Gb 16Mb Cache SataII Drives in Raid0
Corsair HX 850w Power Supply
Antec 1200 Case
3dmark Vantage Score = 19049
3DMark06 Score = 23393
Why dont video card reviews use HL2 source engine for a gaming benmark, to give relevence for us running all the old classics??
And in another 6-8 months or so, it may be back to ATI again, if the 6000 series is out by then, time will tell.
Edit some more: What settings did they use? I'll run with default for now and check back here shortly.
We wait and see real world benchmarks.