[UnixMac]

Mods, I hope this is the right forum for this as it's about the Nv6800 card, and I can find no better spot to discuss it than in the PM forum, if you disagree, please move it to where you think it belongs.

Now...

I downloaded the SpecView benchmark developed by SPEC from Dr. Marcel Bresinks' website here. After following his directions (make sure you have developer tools installed) and compiling the generic Unix version to Mac Unix... I ran the bench mark twice on my system. I encourage any of you with powerful 64MB or more GPU's to download and try it, but read the instructions (which are not that long) very carefully or you might make some dumb mistakes like I did before you get it working right.

Anyway, I got some very interesting results... First off, this is not a CPU benchmark, and I noticed that only my CPU B would ever do any hard work, and then only about 80%... the only temp that ever got hot was the memory controller, and then the GPU would "warm" up but not get all that hot (some 82C) vs upto 92C for the memory controller..

here are the actual results on my system (described in my signature):

3dsmax-03 Weighted Geometric Mean = 9.460
catia-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 5.655
ensight-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 5.913
light-07 Weighted Geometric Mean = 5.873
maya-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 4.670
proe-03 Weighted Geometric Mean = 8.657
sw-01 Weighted Geometric Mean = 7.698
ugs-04 Weighted Geometric Mean = 1.201

The rub lies here were you can clearly see the PC version of my particular card the Nv6800 Ultra is smoked in Open GL (again, no CPU bias in the bench). More specific Nvidia 6800 results are also easy to see here at the bottom of the Dr. Bresink page.

Why? Apple apparently writes the drivers for the Nv40 with code from Nvidia... maybe they need to take this department more seriously and hire some high powered guys to optimize the drivers, otherwise why did some of us drop $600+tax on a card like this??

your thoughts, flames, or agreements?

[Big Mac]

Well, without knowing much about that particular SPEC benchmark, most people consider SPEC to be not very relevant.

[MORT A POTTY]

I would agree that the drivers for the 6800 series cards are not very good, especially compared to the X800 XT.

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by Big Mac:
Well, without knowing much about that particular SPEC benchmark, most people consider SPEC to be not very relevant.

Link to a better one? I'd say that if SPEC says Apple's drivers suck (and various things I've read tend to confirm this), it should be taken seriously. Apple also tends to go for image quality over speed, but I don't think that's the whole issue.

[Thinine]

It is likely that, aside from fixes for specific features, development on the Panther nVidia drivers has stopped. Most of the development effort has probably shifter over to Tiger, which should feature much, much better drivers for nearly all graphics cards, especially nVidia cards. They pretty much have to, to get decent performance out of CoreImage or Quartz 2D Extreme.

[UnixMac]

Originally posted by Thinine:
It is likely that, aside from fixes for specific features, development on the Panther nVidia drivers has stopped. Most of the development effort has probably shifter over to Tiger, which should feature much, much better drivers for nearly all graphics cards, especially nVidia cards. They pretty much have to, to get decent performance out of CoreImage or Quartz 2D Extreme.

I sincerely home that this is true, however Marcel the designer of the adaption code for this 400mb SPEC bench (which is relevant last I heard) said that many high profile Apple Customers have already demanded that Apple address the driver issue.

Marcel said that Apple is satisfied with optimizing the drivers for smaller polygon counts like those found in most games, yet de-prioritized higher polygon count performance like that tested in this bench, and that used by professional 3D apps.

I hope that this is not true as it would again show that Apple is not giving 100% to development of the G5 as a workstation replacement Mac.

I had always thought Polygon performance was a bit more CPU intensive anyway, and that textures and such were GPU... but I guess the newer Drivers shift the polygon workload to the GPU.

Tiger better be good!