Card wars: graphics accelerator vendors play a serious game of leapfrog.

Many battles have been lost and won in the graphics chip arena over the last half year, but none of them conclusively. And though the main combatants haven't changed--ATI, Nvidia, and 3Dlabs continue to vie for marketshare and benchmark ratings--the very measurements upon which these struggles are based have shifted. Since Computer Graphics World covered 3D chip vendors six months ago ("Graphic Equalizers," February 2002, pg. 26), the SPECviewperf benchmarks have been substantially updated to better reflect real-world performance. At the same time, the actual usefulness of benchmarks, always a controversial subject, is being questioned more than ever.

Here's a synopsis of what has happened to date in the ratings: 3Dlabs' high-end Wildcat III 6110 card debuted with spectacular results this winter, but was subsequently trounced in most of the standard SPECviewperf tests by Nvidia's new OpenGL-based Quadro4 900 XGL card. The Wildcat line, though pricey, had usually aced benchmarks in terms of sheer performance. 3Dlabs their began talking about the importance of "real-world benchmarks"--ones based on tasks that actual animators might perform with actual applications, instead of the "artificial" tasks created for SPECviewperf. Such talk sounded disingenuous, considering 3Dlabs' recent ratings. But other industry experts agreed, and shortly thereafter, viewperf 7.0 benchmarks appeared that did indeed more closely mimic real-world performance. Once again, 3Dlabs was at the top of the heap. But soon it shared that honor. As of May, both Nvidia mad 3Dlabs showed best performance in different viewsets of both viewperf and apc benchmarks. (For information on the differences between the two sets, see "A brief description of benchmarks" below.) ATI, for the must part, brought up the rear, though still with respectable performance at a good price.

But how important am benchmarks really? For example, 3Dlabs doesn't even bother submitting its highest end card, the Wildcat III 6210, for benchmark testing because the extra texture memory it features isn't measurable via benchmarks. In the words of Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research based in Tiburon, California, "No sooner did 3Dlabs introduce its killer Wildcat III with twin pipes and integrated pixel processor then ATI rolled out its Radeon 8800 and Nvidia trumped that with the GeForce 4 chipset, soon followed by its Quadro chip line. Does that mean if you bought a Wildcat III you'd be unhappy? Not really. Not if you need a huge memory pool for your textures, and not if you wanted real multi-sampling antialiasing the way it's meant in OpenGL. And if you bought an ATI Radeon 8800, would you be sorry you had after you saw the benchmark scores for the GeForce4? No, unless you run benchmarks for a living."

New Entries

Although benchmarks remain a focal point for users and vendors alike, other issues are on the horizon. One of the biggest changes in the past six months has been the purchase of 3Dlabs by Creative Technology, a company known more for its consumer-level products. At the same time, 3Dlabs has roiled out the chip named tire P10, which is neither OpenGL nor DirectX-based. It will work with DirectX 8 or 9 and OpenGL 2.0 when that ships, and will provide, according to the company, ...