Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks

Fillrate

ATI Radeon HD 4800 have no chances in “pure” fillrate tests, because they have much fewer texturing processors and RBE/ROP units than Nvidia GeForce GTX 200. New solutions on Nvidia G200 are far ahead and as always, prove their best in operations with Z-buffer and stencil buffer. Their performance increases almost linearly compared with Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX, because all the differences are of purely quantitative nature.

However, don’t get too excited and predict an indisputable victory in games for the new Nvidia solutions basing only on the results of this test. As you know, Nvidia uses texture processors with two texturing filtration units per each two addressing units, that makes “free” anisotropic filtering impossible. According to our practical experiments, you should divide the number of Nvidia’s texture processors by 2 every time anisotropic filtering is used. As a result, 80 texturing units of the new Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 will in fact work as 40.

Yes, new Nvidia solutions have a serious advantage over ATI Radeon HD 4800 family: they have twice as many RBE/ROP units. However, this parameter doesn’t really affect the gaming performance any more. It may have certain influence on the performance only if anti-aliasing is enabled in resolutions over 1920x1200. In fact, you shouldn’t really base any conclusions on the results of this test, because they have no connection with reality and only indicate that G200 is today’s fastest monolithic GPU when it comes to fillrate. The gaming performance is affected by much more factors, namely, GPU’s computational capacity. Although the only thing we know about it at this time is that it is definitely superior to G92.