First post, by ratfink
- Rank
- Oldbie
I have a few of these Wildcat VP cards, they use something called a P10 VPU and were aimed at being mid-range workstation cards though supposedly Creative considered releasing something based on them as a consumer card. Found some oddities when I ran 3dmark2001se, thought I'd share - no big deal as these aren't really gaming cards.
These are Dx8.1 and OpenGL cards with driver optimisations/settings for games, so I tried some benchmarking to see whether there was much difference between my cards [3 models], and what difference AA made.
The cards:
VP990 Pro, 512mb memory, 225 vertices/sec
VP870, 128mb memory, 188 vertices/sec
VP760, 64mb memory, 165 vertices/sec
The test: 3dmark2001se on defaults with no AA, 2-sample AA, 4-sample AA, driver set to Direct3d games default [and opengl games default if that matters]
The test system: Soyo 845 board with 2.8ghz P4 and a Santa Cruz for sound; 512mb ram. Windows 2000 with no service packs [the 990 is not compatible with later packs - immediate crash to desktop]. Latest driver used for all cards [same driver file from 3dlabs site].
The results:
No AA: The mid-range 870 beats the 990, with the 760 trailing.
990: 7857 (1.3% lower than 870)
870: 7961
760: 6918 (13% below870)
2-AA: The 990 is the slowest, the 870 leads still
990: 3764 (3.7% lower than 870)
870: 3907
760: 3804 (2.6% lower than 870)
4-AA: same as for 2-AA
990: 1783 (6.3% lower than 870)
870: 1903
760: 1875 (1.5% lower than 870)
Weird? The supposedly faster card is actually slower than the next one down on all tests, and it's the slowest of the three once AA is included.
Assuming the cards do actually meet the reported specs, presumably this means that the bigger memory is wasting time, one way or another. Tempting to suggest it might be a driver issue.
Wondered if there were similar effects on other sorts of graphics cards, where increasing the memory results in a slower card?
