• Benchmark

    OpenCL SDK 2013 Beta: Intel got their act together 

    by
    Carsten
    Published on 23-10-12 21:24     Number of Views: 246194 
    1. Categories:
    2. Benchmark
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    Intel has a less than stellar record when it comes to driver support for anything that is not an inf-update for their mainboard chipsets. After being established by industry leaders like Apple, Nvidia and AMD, Intel could not longer ignore the industry standard OpenCL - the open compute language. More or less reluctantly, they put out driver support for their CPUs, mostly functional, but quite underwhelming when it came to performance.

    One popular example for how enthusiastic Intel was about performance optimized OpenCL drivers could readily be seen by running Luxmark for example. This raytracing benchmark utilizes OpenCL-enabled processors, no matter what kind of beast they are. When you're using a recent Radeon graphics card in your system, chances are that you already have an OpenCL-1.2-enabled driver for your central processor installed - the one that comes with AMDs Catalyst driver package.
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    Anisotropic Texture Filter: An extreme case of optimization 

    by
    Carsten
    Published on 31-10-10 13:26     Number of Views: 213824 
    1. Categories:
    2. Article,
    3. Architecture,
    4. Benchmark
    Texture Filtering vs Villagemark - effect of so called optimizations on fillrate

    Filtered textures have been essential in the breakthrough of consumer-level 3D graphics acceleration 1.5 decades ago. With bilinear filtering applied (in addition to Mip-Mapping), Voodoo Graphics delivered smooth images of legendary 3D games such as Quake, Tomb Raider or Diablo. But despite they say „things change”, bilinear filtering still is the preferred method current hardware employs as a baseline. Now, trilinear filtering starting to become popular at about 1998, added in a second cycle smoothes out the transitions between one Mip-Map-level and another, while anisotropic filtering, which raised to fame around the year 2001, uses filter kernels with different dimension for each axis – hence the name: An meaning „not” and isotropic meaning „equal in all directions”.
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    TessMark 0.2.2: How much Tessellation punch does the Geforce GTS 450 have? 

    by
    Carsten
    Published on 13-09-10 00:00     Number of Views: 283427 
    1. Categories:
    2. Architecture,
    3. Benchmark
    Article Preview

    Today, Nvidia launched it's hitherto smallest member of the GF10x architecture and also the Fermi family dubbed Geforce GTS 450.

    It is based upon a 15x15 mm ASIC called GF106, which boasts 4 Shader Multiprocessors (SM) in one GPC and features the same characteristics as the successful Geforce GTX 460 chip GF104. 48 ALUs - called Cuda-Cores by Nvidia - and eight texture units reside in each SM resulting in 192 ALUs and 32 TMUs across the chip. Also, GF106 has a GDDR5-interface comprised of 3 64 bit channels, each hardwired to an octo-ROP, albeit only two of those are active in currently announced GTS 450 products. ...
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    3D Graphics Benchmark 1997-style: Enter Final Reality v1.1 

    by
    Carsten
    Published on 15-08-10 19:52     Number of Views: 358028 
    1. Categories:
    2. Retro,
    3. Benchmark

    In 1997 it was not always the case that a 3d accelerator really would accelerate your 3d graphics - just remember S3 inglorious ViRGE series which were dubbed 3d decelerators for a reason. But if you were one of the lucky few and had opted for 3dfx' Voodoo Graphics, ATi Rage, Nvidia Riva 128 and a few select others, then you could impress your friends with benchmarks like Final Reality, a co-development of Remedy Entertainment and VNU European Labs.
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