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cadalyst labs feature review
Though our roundup of current graphics cards features some very strong contenders, no across-the-board leader emerged. What our tests did show quite clearly are the individual strengths and weaknesses of the various cards. Overall, we found strong 3D performance, along with some weak OpenGL and 2D test scores. It's not easy to engineer and produce a graphics card that excels in both 2D and 3D, but the lower 2D scores were a bit surprising-particularly because 2D still represents a significant percentage of the workload in most CAD firms. Some results will improve with later iterations of drivers, but drivers alone can't make up for a graphic chipset that offers weak 2D performance.
The most significant new feature is that three of these graphics cards support the AGP 8X interface standard, which can transfer 2GB of graphics information per second between the graphics card and system. This should greatly reduce at least one of the performance bottlenecks in current high-end systems and result in higher performance scores, though the real benefits of AGP 8X may not be realized until faster systems become available.
HOW WE TESTED
Cadalyst Labs tested the graphics cards on an Xi Computer MTower 4800/3600X DPR system based on dual Intel Xeon 2,8GHz processors with 1GB of RAMBUS RAM. This system has a 120GB hard disk and runs Microsoft Windows 2000 Workstation with service pack 2. We used this system because it easily accommodates the 3Dlabs Wildcat4 7110 graphics card, a full-length card that requires two slot spaces (although only one is actually used-the card is thick), and because it has an AGP 8X slot.
We tested all graphics cards with MAXBench 4 running under discreet ads max 5 and the Pro/ENGINEER proe-01 test from SPEC ViewPerf v7.0. These tests are accompanied by the Cadalyst Labs C2001 benchmarks, which thoroughly test AutoCAD 2002-based systems. The C2001 test is not designed to necessarily showcase the fastest CPUs, hard disks, and graphics cards. Rather, it shows how these components all work together in relation to work typically done in an engineering firm. We are always under pressure from vendors to change the C2001 test procedures to showcase specific products, but never fear, our test procedure remains unchanged.
Once again, drivers...