Sunday, July 20th 2008
GPU PhysX Doesn't get you to 3DMark Vantage Hall of Fame Anymore
With NVIDIA releasing their GeForce PhysX drivers, users of the PhysX accelerating GeForce cards were at an advantage over their Radeon counterparts, reason being that in a certain CPU test routine of the 3DMark Vantage benchmark, the physics processing abilities of the computer are tested, and since the physics API used happens to be PhysX, users of GeForce get higher scores despite not having a physics processor device such as an Ageia PhysX card. This differs from a real-life scenario where a GeForce accelerator does both graphics and physics and the overhead of physics processing affects the graphics processing abilities.
The relation of GPU acceleration for gaining higher 3DMark scores in physics tests has been controversial to say the least. Futuremark has now decided to update its Hall of Fame to exclude all results using PhysX on a GPU, simply because this was not how they intended it to work. It has also been updated to organise the results better for easier comparison. You will be able to use GPU physics processing to get a 3DMark score, you will not be able to make it to the Hall of Fame using it. You can use an Ageia PhysX card to assist your 3DMark score to make it to the Hall of Fame, as that's how Futuremark intended PhysX processing scores to assist your final scores.
Source:
NordicHardware
The relation of GPU acceleration for gaining higher 3DMark scores in physics tests has been controversial to say the least. Futuremark has now decided to update its Hall of Fame to exclude all results using PhysX on a GPU, simply because this was not how they intended it to work. It has also been updated to organise the results better for easier comparison. You will be able to use GPU physics processing to get a 3DMark score, you will not be able to make it to the Hall of Fame using it. You can use an Ageia PhysX card to assist your 3DMark score to make it to the Hall of Fame, as that's how Futuremark intended PhysX processing scores to assist your final scores.
62 Comments on GPU PhysX Doesn't get you to 3DMark Vantage Hall of Fame Anymore
I see you're running at 1920x1200, and there ya go.
To put it in perspective, even on my 6400+ X2 at 1440x900, there is no difference from 2-3.4Ghz. The cpu just doesn't play that important of a role in modern games.
Just to remind you ladies and gentlemen, the PPU is technically a GPU that lacks output for Graphics.
Aegia really need to drop their manufacturing process of the PPU core.
It's not like you can have free physics calculation when you're actually PLAYING something
The whole thing is a bit daft since they themselves put in the PhysX test, and use it while not rendering graphics, and it took them long enough to get the benchmark software out so they had plenty of time to think about it.
So what they are saying is that their 3dmark is flawed, but if that's so their solution should be to fix it with a patch that does the physx test WITH graphics I'd say, and release a few apologies for being so stupid in their original design.
Incidentally I never tried vantage (I avoided vista so far) but in the 2006 CPU bench there are graphics during the test of the CPU, low res but still, so if vantage doesn't have graphics during the CPU/PhysX test as I read here it means they actually deliberately made the test worse, and now moan about themselves, pfft.