Content area
Full Text
CADENCE tests the latest graphics cards from 3Dlabs, ATI, and NVIDIA, and finds each to be designed for a different type of user. With a maximum difference of only $150 in their street prices and similar performance in some of the tests, you coyld be misled to conclude they are comparable-but they're not.
The graphics card market is a bit more fragmented at the moment than usual. Not all of the manufacturers are shipping cards designed to directly compete with one another, nor do all of the latest cards feature the same generation of technology. Some are focusing on price instead of performance, some arc focusing on large-model performance instead of faster clock-speeds, and only one vendor is using a graphics chip set that has been shipping for less than six months.
That only one of the vendors has a brand-new graphics chip is likely the result of several factors, such as the general economic conditions and ongoing design development being shifted to new processor chip sets, including Intel's 64-bit Itanium 2, the latest 32-bit Pentium 4/Xeon chip sets, and AMD's 64-bit Opteron platform.
Table 1 shows the results of two SPEC benchmarks-SPECapc for SolidWorks 2003, and SPECviewperf 7.1. While this table shows that the three cards perform similarly in the SPECviewperf benchmark, the SPECapc for SolidWorks 2003 benchmark shows a different tale, and the variety of design intents among the three.
ATI's FireGL Z1 significantly out-performs the other cards when running SolidWorks, making it well-suited for anyone who wants to get the best performance at a reasonable price point with today's mechanical design software.
3Dlabs' Wildcat VP880 Pro has twice the memory (256MB) of the other two cards, so it can better handle the largest LCD monitors or dual high-resolution displays, especially when using large amounts of traditional image-based texture mapping (though the SPEC benchmarks don't test this).
NVIDIA's Quadro FX 500 performs about the same as the 3Dlabs card, but with half the memory doesn't handle the same combination of high-resolution displays and traditional texture maps (nor does it have the stereo connector). But the card is designed to dovetail with the capabilities of NVIDIA's high-level shading language-Cg-which will be a key feature of the forthcoming SolidWorks 2004. (For more information about...