Benchmarks


Theoretical Performances

First up we'll take a look at the throughput of the 5900 Ultra, compared against the throughput of the 5800 Ultra, using 3DMarks theoretical performance tests.


 Pixel Fill (Mpp/s) Texel Fill (Mtp/s) Geometry 1 Light (M tris/s) Geometry 8 Lights (M tris/s) Vertex Shader (FPS)
5800 Ultra 1590.6 3483.0 106.4 30.9 172.6
5900 Ultra 1668.3 3276.6 101.5 28.1 172.8
Diff from 5800 Pixel Fill (Mpp/s) Texel Fill (Mtp/s) Geometry 1 Light (M tris/s) Geometry 8 Lights (M tris/s) Vertex Shader (FPS)
Actual 77.7 -206.4 -4.9 -2.8 0.2
% 5% -6% -5% -9% 0%

The 3DMark Theoretical tests tell a not entirely unexpected story, considering the non-Pixel Shader configuration of 5900 Ultra is unchanged from 5800 Ultra.

At 32-bit colour depth the single texture fill-rate test is usually a fairly bandwidth limited test, so here we see that despite its 50MHz deficit in core speed to the 5800 Ultra, the 5900 Ultra performs slightly better. The multi-texturing test, on the other hand, is not so much bandwidth limited as fill-rate (texture sampling rate) limited, and hence the 5800 Ultra performs slightly better. The difference in single and multi texture rates highlight that, indeed, the fixed function configuration of 5900 Ultra is still one of two texture sampling units per pixel pipeline.

The two fixed function Geometry tests also show the 5800 Ultra as having better performance, which is due to the higher clock-speed the 5800 Ultra has over the 5900 Ultra, and there being no changes in the hardware of the Vertex Shader. The Vertex Shader test, however, belies this. There is a very slight performance advantage to the 5900 Ultra in the Vertex Shader test, which may indicate there are hardware differences with the Vertex Shader, but in fact it's more likely due to the local buffering of vertex data and hence the higher bandwidth of the 5900 Ultra has a faster retrieval of this data giving it a slightly better performance.


SPECviewperf 7.1

Now we'll look at the performances under the high end workstation benchmark SPECviewperf 7.1



 3dsmax-02 drv-09 dx-08 light-06 proe-02 ugs-03
5800 Ultra 13.83 51.36 33.74 12.79 15.18 8.97
5900 Ultra 13.54 51.33 33.75 12.78 15.36 8.23
Diff from 5800 3dsmax-02 drv-09 dx-08 light-06 proe-02 ugs-03
Actual -0.29 -0.03 0.01 -0.01 0.18 -0.74
% -2% 0% 0% 0% 1% -8%

SPECviewperf is quite system limited in many cases, so there is little difference between the rendering performances of the two boards. However, where there are differences it appears that the higher fill-rate and geometry rate of the 5800 Ultra is favoured.