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Date Posted: October 2 , 2002

Benchmarks

Synthetic Benchmarks

    Let us first look at some synthetic benchmarks, and no there is no 3D Mark 2001SE, but rather Villagemark will show how well the 16GB/s of bandwidth the Parhelia does when there is many layers of objects to either render or not.   DroneZmarK will be used to show how many triangles the card can put through in a more real world test.  First lets see how the Parhelia fares against the Kyro II in Villagemark, which was designed to show off the Kyro II's tile based architecture, without AA and ansiotropic filtering.

    What can we see with these results?  It is obvious that the Kyro II outperforms the Parhelia in this test by about 2X.  But we can see some interesting things with the graph. For instance the Parhelia had a much bigger swing between maximum and minimum frame rates at 44 frames while the Kyro II only had a difference of 31 frames, this could well indicate that the Parhelia is somewhat CPU bound even in this test designed to stress just the video card.  What about if we turn on AA and ansiotropic filtering, is there any difference?

    Isn't this interesting, the Kyro II has dropped to an average frame rate of 10fps and its maximum frame rate is only 11fps.  The Parhelia on the other hand has its frame rate only cut in half compared to the non-AA tests.  The slightly flatter curve shows that at these settings the Parhelia isn't as CPU bound as it was in the other test, but it is still has more headroom for improvement given a faster CPU.

    What about DroneZmarK, how many triangles can this card push?   Unfortunately DroneZmarK didn't work well with Fraps so we only have the maximum/minimum/average frame rates as well as the average T&L triangle throughput.   First is 1024*768 without AA or ansiotropic filtering.

    Now for 1024*768 with AA and ansiotropic filtering.

    What do these results show?  Like with Villagemark the Kyro II does not perform well with AA and ansiotropic filtering enabled offering 13% of its performance without these options enabled.  The Parhelia only loses 22% of its performance when you enable these features, albeit that the ansiotropic filtering on the Kyro II is very superior in terms of quality.  This benchmark allows the Parhelia to pull ahead of the Kyro II, as it does not stress the memory saving techniques of the cards, but rather looks at a slightly more realistic scene with complex T&L and other advanced OpenGL shaders. 

    But we don't play synthetic benchmarks (though some of us try), so let us look at some real world games, first OpenGL games and then DirectX games.

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