3DMark2001 SE synthetic tests, 3D graphics

All measurements in 3D are taken at 32bit color depth.

Fillrate

Multitexturing:

R350 and R300 take positions according to the difference in the clock speeds. In the multitexturing mode NV30 takes the lead thanks to 8 texture units at the higher frequency of 500 MHz, but it loses in the single-texture mode because of twice fewer pixel pipelines.

Pixel Shader

Simple variant:

The scores get much better in the higher resolutions. But as we found out earlier (in RightMark 3D), performance of the pixel shaders changes according to the frequency growth.

Probably, it's because of another optimization of ATI's new drivers for R350 working this time only with pixel shaders and in this particular test.

Let's see whether pixel shaders with more intensive calculations make an effect:

Here the performance corresponds to the frequencies, i.e. these marks can be considered adequate.

Vertex Shaders

The results are actually expected.

In general, 3D Mark 2001 scores match RightMark 3D, though they carry less information because synthetic tests parameters are unadjustable.

Summary on synthetic tests

Let's sum up the detailed examination of various units of R350 in the synthetic tests.

1. The architectural differences are quite unimportant. You can regard R350 as R300 with the increased core speed, enhanced optimization of operation of the double-side stencil buffer (which will tell upon in DOOM III based games) and potential hardware support of F-biffer and long pixel shaders.
2. Remember that ATI's drivers enable certain functions only for R350; it might make you think that the architecture of R350 is much superior to R300. But if the new drivers providing the same gain for R300 are released, the difference in the test scores will depend only on that in the clock speeds, which is rather small. Even if the developers never let them out, there may be third-party modifications and patches (for example, in RivaTuner) making these optimizations work on R300. Well, let's see how the events will unfold.

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