SPECviewperf 10 released for XP/Vista

Friday 01st June 2007, 11:39:00 AM, written by Arun

SPECviewperf, the most widely used benchmark for workstation GPUs such as NVIDIA's Quadro and AMD's FireGL, has just seen its 10th version released. This release is for Windows XP and Vista, with support for Linux and Mac OS coming in the next few months. Its major new feature is FSAA benchmarking, with both performance and image quality analysis.

The new release reports FSAA performance in a rather original way: the benchmarks tests all FSAA modes available, then reports what is the highest-end FSAA mode that has a performance hit of less than 10% compared to 0x FSAA, along with the performance of 0x FSAA. Screenshots of the various modes are also taken to let the user subjectively judge the card's FSAA quality.

The SPEC also points out that results under Windows Vista results should not be directly compared to those under Windows XP, unless the WDM and Aero are disabled. Otherwise, extra overhead is incurred, and the vsync behaviour is also very different. Indeed, under Windows Vista, the WDM simply discards pending frames when the window is refreshing faster the display's refresh rate, as the desktop itself always has vsync enabled. This unsurprisingly has different performance characteristics compared to Windows XP's approach.

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Tagging

benchmark ± specviewperf, workstation, opengl