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BFG Technologies ASYLUM GeForce FX 5700 Ultra Review - Page 5 Of 9

3DMARK 2003 (patch 330)

I still maintain that actual game benchmarks are more useful and representative of a cards real-world performance. However, balance is always a good thing and synthetic benchmarks can play a supporting role if used properly along with actual games. Having said that, the scores for 3DMark 2003 (patch 330) are shown below.

NOTE
: The benchmark was run at all default settings and at 1024x768 resolution.

3DMark 2003 Scores

* This was at default clocks (475/900) as 3DMark03 would end prematurely with an error message if the 5700 was overclocked to 545/950.

 

HUMUS DEMOS

For those of you who may have skipped the introduction of this review you may be looking at this and saying to yourself "Hum-whaaaat?" :)  If so, please jump back and read the introduction section before proceeding.

First come the OpenGL demos. Again, all of these demos were benchmarked using FRAPS 2.0. You'll notice Humus' own FPS counter in the upper left of each screenshot below. I can confirm that his FPS counter matched that of what FRAPS was reporting. Since this is not an established/widely accepted form of benchmarking I did not test at multiple resolutions nor did I use FSAA or AF during any tests. I'm playing a bit of "the guinea pig" role here after all. :)

Following are the settings used for each benchmark:

  • Screen Resolution: 1600x1200 (some demos do not allow you to select the resolution but they appeared to run at the Windows desktop resolution settings in which case those would be at 1024x768).

  • 32-bit color depth

  • No FSAA

  • No AF

  • Duration of each test was 20 seconds

Also, I've received permission from Humus to reprint his direct commentary for each demo here so as to provide you with all the background/technical information in one location along with the results.

OpenGL Demos

ShadowsThatDontSuck - OpenGL



When I was at my job interview with nVidia we spoke a little about what kind of project I'd do. As shadows are one of the hardest problems in 3d graphics and most shadowing implementations has some kind of serious drawbacks I got the suggestion to work on "shadows that don't suck" for a project. Even though I didn't get the job I decided to try finding a good shadow algorithm myself anyway. However, after being held back by a driver bug I left the project for the time being and only recently got back into the project again.
 
What I have done is a shadow mapping implementation that works for point lights. The idea is quite simple, instead of rendering the depth into a texture as with normal shadow mapping I render the radial distance into a cubemap. The radial distance is easy to look up in a 3d texture. A check with the stored distance and the currently calculated distance is done in a fragment shader and can easily interact with perpixel lighting. The final result is a very realistic shadow effect.

One of my better demos IMO. This is also the first demo based on my new and much improved framework.

Thanks to MZ for the help with the register combiner code.

It will run on Radeon 8500/GF3 and up.

Required OpenGL extensions:

  • GL_ATI_fragment_shader or GL_NV_register_combiners

  • WGL_ARB_render_texture

  • GL_ARB_texture_cube_map

  • GL_EXT_texture3D

  • GL_EXT_texture_edge_clamp

    Recommended OpenGL extensions:
     

  • GL_ARB_texture_compression

  • GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc
     
    ShadowsThatDontSuck  Benchmark Results

  •  

    StencilShadows - OpenGL

    This demo shows dynamic per-pixel lighting with shadows and proper shadow overlapping. The shadows are created by using the stencil buffer and Carmacks reversed algoritm.

    Required OpenGL extensions:

  • GL_ARB_multitexture

  • GL_EXT_texture_env_dot3

  • GL_ARB_texture_env_combine

  • GL_EXT_texture_edge_clamp

  • GL_EXT_texture3D

  • GL_ARB_texture_env_crossbar or GL_NV_texture_env_combine4
     
    StencilShadows Benchmark Results

  •  

    Game Engine (OpenGL BSP) - OpenGL

    A demo of the game engine I've been working on. It should run on the whole Radeon series card, Parhelia, GeForce 3 and GeForce 4.
    It's a flyby demo, moving you around in a not too unfamilar environment for some of you FPS freaks out there.
    More info about this engine can be found here.

    2002-05-04:
    Bumping this demo up again as I've finally got around to clean up the code and sort of finalized it. Source in now available for all you people that I know have been waiting, I apologize for all the delay. There aren't a whole lot of changes since last time, slightly tweaked lighting, the fogging I worked didn't make it into the demo either, it would be too much trouble to get a solid implementation on todays hardware with the method I tried.

    Required OpenGL extensions:

  • GL_ARB_multitexture

  • GL_ARB_texture_env_dot3

  • GL_ARB_texture_env_combine

  • GL_EXT_texture_edge_clamp

  • GL_EXT_texture3D

  • GL_ARB_texture_env_crossbar or GL_NV_texture_env_combine4

    Recommended OpenGL extensions:
     

  • GL_ATI_fragment_shader or GL_NV_register_combiners

  • GL_ARB_texture_cube_map

  • GL_ARB_texture_compression

  • GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc
     
    Game Engine (OpenGL BSP) Benchmark Results

  •  

    Direct3D Demos

    PhongIllumination - Direct3D

    This is another phong lighting with shadows demo. The difference compared to earlier work is that this one uses Direct3D, R32F shadow cubemaps are used, the squared distance is stored in the shadow map and a multiplication factor is used instead of bias for a nice speedup.

    This is the illustrating code for the "Fragment level Phong illumination" article available in the new Articles section.

    Required Direct3D capabilities:

  • Pixel shader v2.0

  • Vertex shader v2.0

  • R32F cube render targets
     
    PhongIllumination Benchmark Results

  •  

    SelfShadowBump - Direct3D

    This demo does self shadowing bumpmapping. Letting the bumps in the bumpmap cast shadows over the surface really adds a lot to the feeling of depth of bumpmaps. On the bad side of things is that it's not exactly for free, though not horribly expensive either. A horizon map is needed for every texture. The horizon map is a 3D texture of considerable size. For some textures you can get away with a fairly low res horizon map, for others you need a quite large one to get good results. For this demo I'm using one 256KB large horizon map and one 1MB large one for another texture. Performance quickly suffers if I use larger horizon maps.

    For the sky I've written a shader that animates some kind of cloudy Quake-looking sky by using a 3D noise.

    All shaders are written in HLSL.

    The demo should run on Radeon 9500 and up and GeForce FX series.

    2003-10-11:
    Updated to include a menu item to let you toggle selfshadowing on and off.

    Required Direct3D capabilities:

  • Pixel shader version 2.0

  • Vertex shader version 2.0
     
    SelfShadowBump Benchmark Results

  •  

    TransparentShadowMapping - Direct3D

    Normally shadowmapping uses only a single channel of the texture the scene is rendered to. Using that depth you can extract information about whether the current fragment is in shadow or not. However, this only works for opaque occluders. This demo extends the idea to work for transparent surfaces too, and makes transparent surfaces cast a projection of itself over the scene. To do this not only the depth is rendered to the texture, but also a color. Opaque surfaces renders white along with the depth, while transparent surface renders its color and leaves the depth unmodified. Then by simply multiplying the shadow factor contructed in a normal shadowmapping fashion with the color stored in the shadow map you'll get a nice projection of transparent surfaces over the scene.

    The demo should works on Radeon 9500 and up and the GeForce FX.

    Required Direct3D capabilities:

  • Pixel shader 2.0

  • Vertex shader 2.0
     
    TransparentShadowMapping Benchmark Results

  •  

    Sketch - Direct3D

    This is a demo that renders the scene to look as if it would have been sketched. This is done by finding edges in the picture. First the scene is rendered to a texture and the normals and the depth are outputted into it. Then a Sobel filter is applied to all components. This will highlight all edges, not only the silhouette against the background, but also internal edges where there's a difference in depth or when the normal changes a lot over a small distance. To get a smoother image, and to give it a fuzzy pencil drawn feeling, the edge value isn't thresholded, but instead I'm outputting the square of the Sobel filter to allow all kinds of shades of gray. Finally a slight blur filter is applied to smooth it out a little.

    Should run on Radeon 9500+ and GFFX.

    Required Direct3D capabilities:

  • Vertex shader 1.1

  • Pixel shader 2.0
     
    Sketch Benchmark Results

  •  

    So, what to conclude from these results...to be perfectly honest I have no idea. That shouldn't be much of a surprise either since these demos don't have a history of being benchmarked (to the best of my knowledge). I've requested that Humus provide some insight on these results though and if he does I will update this section of the review with that information.

    My SWAG on these results is that the BFG 5700 Ultra held its own for the most part regarding OpenGL performance. The large discrepancy in the Direct3D demos is a more difficult call and one I'll wait on making until I know more. At any rate, these are not representative of game performance and hopefully Humus (or others) can shed some light on things in the near future.

    Next Page: Texture Filtering and Direct3D AF Tests

    Last Updated on October 24, 2003


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