I have to say that SPECviewperf offers one more interesting feature. It allows measuring the performance drop with enabled anti-aliasing (FSAA). The diagrams below show how the results of standard SPECviewperf tests change in different FSAA modes:

I would like to say that sometimes anti-aliasing helps Nvidia cards outperform the pricing and positioning analogues from FireGL family.

However, do not blindly follow the obtained results: the practical value of SPECviewperf numbers should be taken with certain allowances. This test does show the peak performance of the OpenGL driver in real applications. However, you should bear in mind the fact, that this benchmark’s scripts use far not the latest versions of CAD and CAM systems. Although SPECviewprf benchmarking suit is updated regularly, it still uses almost 5-year-old model of applications behavior. Moreover, do not forget about the ever growing tendency to transfer professional applications from OpenGL to DirectX that can currently offer more options, especially when it comes to shader processing. For example, Microsoft API is already moving into 3ds max and AutoCAD, which is not taken into account by the benchmark. Therefore, SPECviewperf tests cannot really replace real professional applications that we are going to talk about next.