Serious Sam Histogram
Let's take a look at the histogram of the SS:SE Citadel demo running at 1024x768 on the Parhelia.
We can see that the peaks for the two driver sets occur pretty similarly, but outside of the peaks the older driver seems to be rendering mostly in the 40-60 FPS range whereas the newer driver appears to be down in the 40's for much of the time.
SPECviewperf 7.0
Here we'll take a look at the performance of Parhelia under the professional workstation OpenGL benchmark SPECviewperf 7.0
| 3dsmax-01 | drv-08 | dx-07 | light-05 | proe-01 | ugs-01 |
| 1.0.0.233 | 5.64 | 9.58 | 23.11 | 6.37 | 1.01 | 0.00 |
| 1.2.0.42 | 3.41 | 5.05 | 25.35 | 2.80 | 2.03 | 1.15 |
| Difference | 3dsmax-01 | drv-08 | dx-07 | light-05 | proe-01 | ugs-01 |
| Actual | -2.23 | -4.53 | 2.24 | -3.57 | 1.02 | 1.15 |
| % | -40% | -47% | 10% | -56% | 100% | 100% |
In general terms it would appear that the performance of Parhelia is below that of what we'd expect for many retail boards at the moment, the 'proe-01' and 'ugs-01' tests in particular.
Looking at the comparisons between the two driver sets we can see that half of the tests are up and half are down. Of the two tests that have increased 100% in performance we can see it's because one of the tests has moved from 1 FPS to 2 FPS and the other test didn't run on the initial set of drivers, while it achieved 1 FPS on the later drivers.
Having talked with Matrox it appears that they feel they had made progress with their later OpenGL drivers under the various applications that SPECviewperf 7.0 is testing and these improvments were not reflected in our tests. Upon further investigation it turns out there was a difference in settings between our configuration and Matrox's internal SPECviewperf testing.
For this review we tested SPECviewperf under standard/settings, which includes a default AGP aperture size of 64MB, the results above are correct for those settings. However, if the AGP aperture size is increased to 256MB then a slightly different story is told under SPECviewperf...
| 3dsmax-01 | drv-08 | dx-07 | light-05 | proe-01 | ugs-01 |
| 1.0.0.233 | 5.63 | 9.58 | 23.15 | 6.36 | 1.01 | 0.00 |
| 1.2.0.42 | 8.40 | 19.18 | 46.57 | 9.89 | 4.30 | 5.89 |
| Difference | 3dsmax-01 | drv-08 | dx-07 | light-05 | proe-01 | ugs-01 |
| Actual | 2.77 | 9.60 | 23.42 | 3.54 | 3.29 | 5.89 |
| % | 49% | 100% | 101% | 56% | 327% | 100% |
With a 256MB AGP aperture size enabled we can see that Matrox have indeed made significant gains under these benchmark, hence, hopefully, throughout all the applications that SPECviewperf tests. Its a bit of a mystery why similar gains are not shown with smaller AGP apertures though.
The workstation market is an important market for Matrox and it does appear that some significant effort has gone into their later drivers to cater for this market. This is evident with the performance increases we see here.
