All Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs reports

Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs

Application Interface Boards

This was a busy week for the elves at Mt. Tiburon Testing labs (MTTL), not that it’s every slow around here. Stuff piles up almost faster than we can experiment with it, but as we’ve said many times before, this is so much fun it’s hard to imagine getting paid to do it. Well that’s a lie, it’s not always fun, in fact sometimes it’s so damn frustrating all you want to is throw the computer and whatever it is you’re trying to get to work out the window and then run and jump up and down on it while screaming and ripping out your hair.

The real cliché that is so sadly true is, How do normal people ever get this crap to work?

Figure 1: Hello. We're from VISTA and we're here to help you…. (Courtesy of Columbia Pictures)

Vista hasn’t made life any easier, in fact it’s almost made life impossible as it fights your attempts to install and then uninstall drivers or other tools. Eventually we’ll learn how to circumvent the barriers Vista has put up, just as we did with XP, Windows 2000, and other “clever” operating systems before them.

Our fun has been definitely diminished thanks to Vista and given the limited time we have to run these wonderful new products through the paces and get to know them a little better, the distractions due to an obtuse OS is has turned a fun vocation into work—and we hate that.

Nonetheless, the elves have preservered and managed to actually get some things working, and the following stories will give you our latest’s discoveries, delights, and disappointments.

So many AIBs, so little time.

Figure 2: AMD's new single-slot Radeon HD3850 AIB. (Source AMD)

Figure 3: AMD's new Radeon HD3870 AIB. (Source AMD)

Figure 4: Nvidia's GeForce 8800GT (Source Nvidia)

We had three new AIBs to play with this past couple of weeks. When we run tests on AIBs, we run them on three platforms, and two operating systems:

• A single PCIe slot Intel Quad Core running Vista.
• A dual slot PICe AMD FX Dual Core CrossFire-compatible running Vista.
• A dual-slot PICe AMD FX Dual Core SLI compatible running XP.

Granted that’s not the most extensive list of platforms, but it is enough, in our opinion, to get a pretty good view of how these AIBs perform vis a vis each other.

The tests we run are:

• Vista
  • 3DMark06.
  • Call of Juarez.
  • F.E.A.R.
  • FutureMark Vantage.
• XP
  • 3DMark06.
  • HalfLife2.
  • F.E.A.R.

We run them at 1280 x1024, 1600 x1220, and, when possible, 2580 x 1600. We run them with 4x AA on and off, and with SLI or Crossfire on or off, depending on the capabilities of the AIBs.

So, we end up with a lot of numbers.

We also end up with a lot of impressions and experiences; for example:

AMD HD3850

Loading the drivers for the new HD3850 proved extremely time consuming in Vista. The Catalyst driver provided by ATI from the FTP site would not load correctly, The display driver itself and “south bridge filter driver” both failed. To get them loaded, after multiple attempts trying to do it ourselves, we had to call ATI where, after deleting files in RegEdit and manually loading the display driver through the Device Manager, we got it to work. The board is shown in Figure 2.

We finally got the AIBs to work properly—or so we thought. However, while running the first set of tests, 3DMark06, an error was registered during the 2560x1600 4xAA Crossfire test. After multiple attempts, we gave up.

When we went on to the Call of Juarez benchmark it ran, but during the first test Juarez froze up and a reboot was required. We were able to run three tests on Juarez, before machine froze again. The Vantage benchmarking runs a lot smoother.

AMD HD3870

The 3870 is an AIB with an over clocked and bigger cooled version of the RV670 chip. It is a dual slot board, as Figure 3 shows.

Although not visible in the photo, the Radeon HD3850 and HD3870 have two CrossFire tabs at the top of the AIB, indicating its ability to be run in a quad-CrossFire mode.

CrossFire results

We ran three benchmarks (3DMark06, PCMark Vantage, FEAR, and Call of Juarez) at various resolutions depending upon what the application would allow. The results were quite mixed as might be expected. However, the overall average of all the tests and resolutions and filters was 44% which is pretty close to the ideal.

Nvidia GeForce 8800GT

As mentioned earlier, we also tested the new Nvidia GeForce 8800GT. We covered the specifications of the 8800GT in the last issue of TechWatch.

The GeForce 8800 GT has just one SLI tab connector and can not be run in Tri-SLI mode.

The test results

The results were mixed, which is pretty normal given all the variables involved with processors, GPUs, tests, and OSes.

The only two tests we could get run on all platforms and OS were PC Mark 06 and F.E.A.R. Running F.E.A.R on the Pentium III QuadCore system with the Nvidia AIB produced un-remarkable results, basically the same score regardless of resolution or filtering, and strangely a lower score than on the slower dual-core AMD FX processors.

Long benchmark

The PC Mark Vantage Vista benchmark is horrendous—it takes an average of 1.5 hours to run, obviously you can’t get too many tests done in a day, or even two.

A word about Fraps

Fraps is a utility that runs in the background and superimposes a frame counter on the application. It shows in real time how many frames-per-second (FPS) you’re getting. It’s a great way to measure performance in a game, and possibly the only way for average users to get a handle on the complex business of benchmarking, and you can do screen captures to record the results.

The numbers

Sadly there’s not much of them. We simply ran out of time for this publication to get them all done. We will publish the final results on the web page and they should be there by the time you read this.

The only benchmark on which we could get reliable results and in a reasonable time was 3DMark06. Here then, in Figure 5 and Figure 6 are the results from that effort for a single board at three resolutions, with AA on and off.

As the data indicates in Table 1, the use of AA degrades the performance an average of 27%.

AMD says the HD3850 will sell for $179 and the HD3870 will be $219. The best price we could find for the Nvidia GF8800GT was $249 If you take the benchmark numbers and ASPs across the resolutions and filtering results, you get an average Benchmark/Dollar value as shown in Table 2.

And, as the table shows, you pay for performance, but it’s interesting how closely grouped the three products are.

Figure 5: Benchmark comparisons between AMD and Nvidia AIBs with no AA. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Figure 6: Benchmark comparisons between AMD and Nvidia AIBs with 4X AA. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Table 1: Degradation of 4X AA at various resolutions. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Table 2: Benchmarks/dollar for the various AIBs. (Source: Jon Peddie Research)

Summary

What do we think? Well these are damn fine AIBs, a lot, a really lot of value and power for the money—possibly the best value AMD and Nvidia have offered in a while, and AIBs with long legs—they will be good to use as Vista and DirectX 10 games become available.

Test scores are about what we’d expect for AIBs in this price range. Actually, that’s not correct, they’re higher than what we expected.

So we give the AIBs a big thumb’s up.

As for Vista, a big thumbs down. It cost us more time and trouble trying to get thing working than we or any sensible person is willing to spend—bottom line—VISTA IS NO FUN!

And, with regard to PC Mark Vantage, it’s too long to use in a production environment if you want to test for multiple resolutions, and filters. At 1.5h per test, to run three resolutions with to filters (AA on, AA off), will take a minimum of nine hours. The test itself is interesting , and there is a lot of data available from it, it just takes too long.

Call of Juarez To get it to give stable (i.e., repeatable) results, the system has to be rebooted for each test—three resolutions, filters on and off, dual AIB on and off, equals twelve reboots per AIB or 36 reboots total.

Fraps, is perhaps the most honest and straightforward mechanism we have of testing graphics boards. It gives an unambiguous result in FPS, runs with any program, and is only $37 to download. You can get a sample version for free if you’re not sure it’s what you want.

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