Test Setup and Methods

There's really not much glamour to be found here, as you can easily ascertain from the easy to read table provided below. We used a publicly available (at the time of writing) build of drivers for the RV740, namely 8.66RC7, whereas we stuck with nVidia's latest published set, namely 190.62. Given the nature of the tests we include in an architecture analysis, and the maturity of the hardware we're looking at, drivers are usually measured to have an impact that varies between “none” and “none whatsoever”.

Testing Methods

No major change has occurred on this front since our last outing, with results being gathered by leveraging both home-brew as well as freely available testing tools. Be aware that we focus on uncovering how the architecture ticks, so our tests focus primarily on extracting all that can be extracted, rather than mimicking what you'll find in the latest and greatest game, for example. We'll be looking at instruction issue rates, texturing performance across multiple formats and texture resolutions, the impact of differing filtering modes, and ROP throughput with and without AA, to name just a few of the things you can expect to find in this particular stew. Hopefully, it'll be a rather fun and interesting ride.

This is as good a place as any to admit that our tool-set is in need of a rather thorough update, even more so given the imminent arrival of DirectX 11, and the slew of recent updates that have sort of kind of made OpenGL appealing again. To wit, we started earnest development on a suite of new D3D10+, OpenCL and OpenGL tools last week (cross-platform in places, too!).

Now, we recommend getting a reasonable supply of your favourite beverage, be it coffee, tea or even prune juice, because this marks the end of foreplay and the beginning of the real action.