Wow! Detonator 10.5 and T&L performance

[Adrian]

Here are some benchmarks from two NVIDIA T&L benchmark programs and my app.

Benmark5 - Direct X, no lighting
Balls - OpenGL, lighting, display lists
Mars3D(My app) - OpenGL, lighting, vertex arrays (glDrawElements)

The figures represent million polys/sec

My P.C. spec is PIII 700 + ELSA GF2

Original ELSA driver
Benmark5 - 17.9
Balls - 7.2
Mars3D - 3.3

Detonator 6.72
Benmark5 - 17.9
Balls - 12.1
Mars3D - 3.8

Detonator 10.5 (leaked)
Benmark5 - 17.9
Balls - 12.1
Mars3D - 7.1 !!

Even when I implemented the VAR extension to avoid the AGP bottleneck (I ditched this version afterwards for various reasons) my app never went much past 5M Tris/Sec because of memory bandwidth bottleneck on the GF2(I think). The NVIDIA VAR demo acheives its high T&L figure by using calculated vertices and doesnt need to get them from memory.

So this is quite amazing, almost a 90% speed increase!. As you can see from the figures display list performance is unchanged but it looks like there has been some driver optimisation to reduce bandwidth requirements for vertex array apps? (I'm guessing thats what theyve done )

Finally I can say that my app uses the T&L chip fully....well almost

If you want to try out Mars3D its here www.mars3d.co.uk

Benchmark figures were taken using the viewer software running the Mars Globe dataset at the highest resolution(not automatic).

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has T&L benchmarked the 10.5 drivers. If AGP is not a bottleneck in your app you may not see any improvement.

[This message has been edited by Adrian (edited 02-18-2001).]

[Quaternion]

Detonator 10.5?

[richardve]

Yep, 10.5!
Some options are changed and nvOpenGL.dll is bigger.

I've tried them but there's no speed increase in both OGL & DX.
Some games won't run and it's actually 3 FPS slower in my own app

And I've got a GeForce2 MX (AGP 1x) on a PIII 500 with 128 MB SDRAM (100).

[davepermen]

does it has GL_NV_vertex_program in, or GL_EXT_texture_env_dot3

i ask because i have win2k, and i just found the 9x version

[richardve]

Yes, it has support for NV_vertex program.
Don't know about EXT_texture_env_dot3, I think it's also supported.

AFAIK there's only a 9x version.

[Tom Nuydens]

I can't comment about the new driver's performance yet, but here's another thing.

If you download the latest nvOpenGLspecs.pdf from NVidia, notice below the "Table of OpenGL extension support" on page 4:

R10 = Introduced in the release 10 OpenGL driver (not supported by earlier OpenGL drivers)

Also notice that the table has been extended with a column for NV20. Extensions that have been marked with "R10" are:
• ARB_imaging
• EXT_texture_lod_bias (for TNT family)
• NV_evaluators (undocumented?!)
• NV_vertex_program
• WGL_ARB_pixel_format
• WGL_ARB_pbuffer

There's also talk of an "NV20 emulation mode" for GeForces, I see a new (?) NV_texture_shader extension, an upgrade to NV_register_combiners, a new texture compression mechanism, ... Damn! Could it be that we're in for a few treats in the near future?

- Tom

[LordKronos]

Actually, I just downloaded the doc, and its the same old version. None of the stuff you said. Looks like you stumbled onto their mistake and they removed it. Do you still have a copy?

[Tom Nuydens]

Originally posted by LordKronos:
Actually, I just downloaded the doc, and its the same old version. None of the stuff you said. Looks like you stumbled onto their mistake and they removed it. Do you still have a copy?

Actually, now that you mention it, I found it through Google, when searching for info on some of those new extensions in the R10 drivers. The one that's linked to on NVidia's site is dated Nov 1, 2000 - the one Google turned up is Jan 24, 2001. I guess they don't want you to see this one:
http://www.nvidia.com/Marketing/ Develop...OpenGLspecs.pdf

See? Google will find anything!

- Tom

[EDIT] I hope NVidia doesn't sue my ass for disclosing this

[This message has been edited by Tom Nuydens (edited 02-19-2001).]

[LordKronos]

Got it. Thank you, thank you, and thank you again.

[Michael Steinberg]

Is it somehow possible to save the pdf files as simple txt files? I don't like the acrobat reader...