Legit Video Card Reviews
EVGA, Palit and XFX GeForce 9600 GT Video Card Review
| Manufacturer: | NVIDIA |
| Product: | NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GT 512MB GDDR3 Graphics Cards |
| Date: | Thu, Feb 21, 2008 - 12:00 AM |
| Written By: | Nathan Kirsch - |
| Share: |
Lightsmark 2007
LIGHTSMARK is a new benchmark/demo with real-time global illumination and penumbra shadows created by Stepan Hrbek. Lightsmark version 1.3 was used as it contains new rendering paths for ATI Radeon HD 2xxx and 38XX series graphics cards. Before version 1.3 was released, the ATI Radeon HD 38xx series video cards were unable to render objects in the benchmark.
Benchmark Features:
- realtime global illumination
- realtime penumbra shadows
- realtime color bleeding
- infinite light bounces
- fully dynamic HDR lighting
- 220000 triangles in scene
It should be noted that ATI questioned our use of this benchmark as the developer is a private individual that never contacted developer relations at ATI. ATI also made it clear to us that although this benchmark uses global illumination, that it is not similar to the DX10.1 demo that ATI been showing. ATI isn't sure how the benchmark is made as they have not had time to look into it, but if its rendering to cube maps then its likely that performance could be increased if the app used DX10.1's indexed cube maps.
To be fair to both side we contacted the creator of Lightsmark 2007 and Stepan Hrbek had this to say.
"I developed it with 3 Radeon and 3 GeForce cards, randomly switching them, there are no special optimizations, IMHO it's fair. I bought all 6 cards, no gifts.. Small unfairness is only in quality. The same shader on Nvidia card produces smoother shadows but I don't give Nvidia any bonus points for quality, only fps is measured. It uses completely new technique where part of calculation runs on CPU, drivers were not optimized for it for years, so it's possible that it hits some unoptimized driver code. But both companies are in the same situation."
Since we ran the test, we will go ahead and include it, but what the results mean is up in the air.
Benchmark Results: NVIDIA cards in general do great on this benchmark, but when you look at just the NVIDIA results the GeForce 9600 GT scales nicely as the core and shader clocks are increased.
Next Page - Temperatures
| Review Index |
|
Page 1 - GeForce 9 Series Cards Arrive
Page 2 - EVGA e-GeForce 9600 GT SSC Page 3 - Palit 9600 GT Sonic Page 4 - XFX GeForce 9600 GT (PV-T94P-YDF) Page 5 - The Test System Page 6 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Page 7 - Company of Heroes Page 8 - World in Conflict Page 9 - BioShock Page 10 - Crysis Page 11 - Call of Duty 4 Page 12 - 3DMark 2006 Page 13 - Lightsmark 2007 Page 14 - Temperatures Page 15 - Power Consumption Page 16 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions |
Socialize