Benchmarks - Serious Magic Image Downloading (Upstream)
Another test that should highlight potential bus performance differences is Serious Magic's Texture Download Benchmark. This application renders and image on the graphics board and then reads the image back to the host system, thus testing the upstream performance of the graphics board.
| Serious Magic Image Download (FPS) | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 |
| X700 XT | 151.7 | 81.3 | 50.2 | 30.7 | 21.1 |
| X700 PRO | 129.8 | 83.1 | 51.4 | 30.5 | 21.4 |
| X800 XT | 125.6 | 77.8 | 48.2 | 29.8 | 20.0 |
| X600 XT | 124.1 | 78.3 | 48.0 | 29.7 | 20.3 |
| 9800 PRO | 90.8 | 59.2 | 36.5 | 22.8 | 15.7 |
Looking at the fill-rate performance of the Serious Magic test we see that for the most part the performance of all the PCI Express boards are very close to each other, with the AGP 9800 PRO somewhat behind. Given these trends and the nature of the fill-rate graph its clear that the performance here is limited by the size of the upload transfer rate - as the resolution increases, so too will the size of the uploaded image.
| Serious Magic Image Download (MB/s) | 640x480 | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 |
| X700 XT | 396.3 | 406.5 | 408.1 | 414.1 | 415.7 |
| X700 PRO | 411.7 | 407.4 | 417.8 | 416.7 | 417.2 |
| X800 XT | 376.5 | 376.3 | 371.6 | 382.0 | 377.4 |
| X600 XT | 370.8 | 374.5 | 376.4 | 379.1 | 380.1 |
| 9800 PRO | 160.2 | 159.4 | 164.2 | 169.3 | 172.4 |
Again, the performance in terms of Megabytes of transferred data confirms what we saw before. In this instance the PCI Express boards are offering over double the transfer rates than the AGP board is. It would also appear that both the X700's have a slightly higher upload rate than the other PCI Express boards.
In both of the PCI Express test cases here we see that the X700's performances are in-line with the rest of ATI's PCI Express boards, indicating that there appears to be no specific issues with the bus on this chip. The performance characteristics here probably shouldn't come as much surprise as the PCI Express implementation is all likely to have been derived from the X600 platform anyway.
