Workstation Graphics: AGP Cross Section 2004
by Derek Wilson on December 23, 2004 4:14 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Test
The test system is an IWill DK8N board powered by a 520W OCZ Powerstream PSU. The Dual Opteron 250 system had 2 GB of RAM (1 GB for each processor), and although the board supports NUMA, the feature was not enabled for this test. The IWill motherboard is simply an amazing workstation platform. It can handle up to 16GB of RAM, is loaded with PCI-X slots, and is jam-packed with features. Since the DK8N is a hybrid AMD chipset and nForce 3 motherboard, IWill is able to bring workstation users the best of the DP world and the desktop world in one package.The dual configuration helps to keep the majority of the load on the graphics card in our testing. It may be interesting to experiment with single, dual and quad processor workstation scaling in the future. For now, this box will work beautifully for our tests.
The drivers that we chose to use for our workstation graphics cards were all beta or pre-release drivers, which each vendor assures us passes internal Q/A as far as image quality is concerned. NVIDIA sees the most performance improvement when moving from their 6x.xx series driver to the 70.41 series driver. In fact, when SPECviewperf 8 was launced in September, 3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm 200 cards lead performance in 7 out of 8 tests. The performance trends are quite different in today's lineup, as NVIDIA's driver team has done quite well to gain performance from professional level applications on the 6 Series architecture with the 7x.xx series driver. Of course, this makes us very interested in revisiting this test with a GeForce card when we have a 70 series ForceWare driver available.
| Performance Test Configuration | |
| Processor(s): | 2 x AMD Opteron 250 |
| RAM: | 4 x 512MB OCZ PC3200 EL ECC Registered (2 per CPU) |
| Hard Drive(s): | Seagate 120GB 7200RPM IDE (8MB Buffer) |
| Motherboard & IDE Bus Master Drivers: | AMD 8131 APIC Driver NVIDIA nForce 5.10 |
| Video Card(s): | 3Dlabs Wildcat Realizm 200 ATI FireGL X3-256 NVIDIA Quadro FX 4000 HIS Radeon X800 XT Platimum Edition IceQ II Prolink GeForce 6800 Ultra Golden Limited |
| Video Drivers: | 3Dlabs 4.04.0608 Driver ATI FireGL 8.08-041111a-019501E Performance Driver NVIDIA Quadro 70.41 (Beta) NVIDIA ForceWare 67.03 (Beta) ATI Catalyst 4.12 |
| Operating System(s): | Windows XP Professional SP2 (without pae kernel) |
| Motherboards: | IWill DK8N v1.0 (AMD-81xx + NVIDIA nForce 3) |
| Power Supply: | 520W OCZ Powerstream PSU |
And to power our monster of a system, we needed a PSU that could deliver the juice. Once again, we turned to our OCZ Powerstream PSU. Even with 2 Opteron 250s, a GeForce 6800 Ultra, 2GB of RAM, and a couple of drives attached, the OCZ power supply had no problem keeping our machine fed. More importantly, the modular connectors allow us to hook up our PSU to a standard 20-pin ATX, 24-pin ATX12V like 915/925/nforce 4 boards use, and the 24-pin EPS12V that most workstation boards require.
We chose to run with a desktop resolution of 1280x1024x32 @85Hz. All the Windows XP eye candy was turned off and tuned for performance. Our virtual memory pagefile was set to 4092MB min and max, and system restore was turned off. After all applications were installed and all benchmarks were run once, the system was defragmented.
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Jeanlou - Thursday, December 1, 2005 - link
Hello,I just bumped into AnandTech Video Card Tests, and I'm really impressed !
As a Belgian Vision Systems Integration Consultant (since 1979), I'm very interrested about the ability to compare these 3 cards (Realizm 200 vs FireGL X3 256 vs NVIDIA Quatro FX 4000).
I just had a bad experience with the Realizm 200 (!)
On a ASUS NCCH-DL motherboard, Dual Xeon 2.8GHz, 2GB DDR 400, Seagate SCSI Ultra 320 HDD, 2 EIZO monitors (Monitor N°1= L985EX at 1600x1200 px), (Monitopr N°2= L565 at 1280x1024 px), Windows XP Pro SP2 x32bit partition C:\ 16GB, Windows XP Pro x64bit edition partition D:\ 16GB, plus Extended partions (2 logical E:\ and F:\). All NTFS.
Using the main monitor for images analyses (quality control) and the slave monitor for tools, I was unable to have a stable image at 1600 by 1200 pixels. While the Wildcat4 - 7110, or even the VP990 Pro have a very stable screen at maximum resolution. But the 7110 and the VP990 Pro don't have drivers for Window XP x64bit.
Tried everything, latest BIOS, latest drive for ChipSet...
Even 3Dlabs was unable to give me the necessary support and do not answer anymore !
As soon I reduced the resolution from the main monitor to 1280 by 1024, was everything stable, but that's not what I want, I need the maximum resolution on the main monitor.
The specs from 3Dlabs resolution table is giving 3840 by 2400 pixels maximum!
I send it back, and I'm looking for an other card.
I wonder if the FireGL X3 256 will do the job ?
We also use an other monitor from EIZO (S2410W) with 1920 by 1200 pixels !
What are exactly the several resolutions possible with the FireGL X3 256 using 2 monitors ? I cannot find it on the specs.
Any comment will be appreciated,
Best regards,
Jean
kaissa - Sunday, February 20, 2005 - link
Excellent article. I hope that you make workstation graphic card comparision a regular article. How about an article on workstation notebooks? Thanks a lot.laverdir - Thursday, December 30, 2004 - link
dear derek wilson,could you tell us how much is the performance
difference between numa and uma in general
on this tests..
and it would be great if you could post maya
related results for guadro 4k with numa enabled..
seasonal greetings
RedNight - Tuesday, December 28, 2004 - link
This is the best workstation graphics card review I have read in ages. Not only does it present the positive and negatives of each the principal cards in question, it presents them in relationship to high end mainsteam cards and thereby helps many, including myself, understand the real differences in performance. Also, by inovatingly including AutoCAD and Gaming Tests one gets a clear indication of when the workstation cards are necessary and when they would be a waste of money. ThanksDerekWilson - Monday, December 27, 2004 - link
Dubb,Thanks for letting us know about that one :-) We'll have to have a nice long talk with NV's workstation team about what exactly is going on there. They very strongly gave us the idea that the featureset wasn't present on geforce cards.
#19, NUMA was disabled because most people running a workstation with 4 or fewer GB of RAM on a 32 machine will not be running with the pae kernel installed. We wanted to test with a setup most people would be running under the circumstances. We will test NUMA capabilities in the future.
#20,
When we test workstation CPU performance or system performance, POVRay will be a possible inclusion. Thanks for the suggestion.
Derek Wilson
mbhame - Sunday, December 26, 2004 - link
Please include POVRay benchies in Workstation tests.Myrandex - Saturday, December 25, 2004 - link
I wonder why NUMA was fully supported but yet disabled. Maybe instabilities or something.Dubb - Friday, December 24, 2004 - link
http://newbietech.net/eng/qtoq/index.phphttp://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?s=2347485b...
Dubb - Friday, December 24, 2004 - link
uhhh.. my softquadro'd 5900 ultra begs to differ. as would all the 6800 > qfx4000 mods being done by people on guru3d's rivatuner forum.I thought you guys knew that just because nvida says something doesn't mean it's true?
they must consider "physically different sillicon" to be "we moved a resistor or two"...
DerekWilson - Friday, December 24, 2004 - link
By high end features, I wasn't talking about texturing or prgrammatic vertex or fragment shading (which is highend in the consumer space).I was rather talking about hardware support for: AA lines and points, overlay plane support, two-sided lighting (fixed function path), logic operations, fast pixel read-back speeds, and dual 10-bit 400MHz RAMDACs and 2 dual-link DVI-I connectors supporting 3840x2400 on a single display (the IBM T221 comes to mind).
There are other features, but these are key. In products like Maya and 3D Studio, not having overlay plane support creates an absolutely noticable performance hit. It really does depend on how you push the cards. We do prefer the in application benchmarks to SPECveiwperf. Even the SPECapc tests can give a better feel for where things will fall -- because the entire system is a factor rather than just the gfx card and CPU.
#14, Dubb -- I hate to be the one to tell you this -- GeForce and Quadro are physically different silicon now (NV40 and NV40GL). AFAIK, ever since GF4/Quadro4, it has been impossible to softquadro an nvidia card. The Quadro team uses the GeForce as it's base core, but then adds on workstation class features.