After upgrading my old 5870 to a shiny brand new 7970 last week, I decided to put the new card through its paces. The problem with all the consumer-brand video cards is: no-one really bothers to test these in 3d apps, and the general opengl performance. (though reviews like http://tinyurl.com/6wpy7ot can be helpful)
This has cost me money and time when I bought a Nvidia 480GTX about 1 1/2 year ago, and, much to my dismay, discovered that the 4xx consumer line of cards (as well as the newer 5xx cards) from Nvidia were severly crippled in their opengl performance. I was running a 280gtx before that, and the 480gtx performance was literally on par with a two generations older 9800gtx - four times slower than the 280.
edit [on Nvidia cards performance can be much improved by turning off double-faced polys:
Zalamander: In order to restore performance, you must disable double sided lighting for every object. (object data -> double sided; you must be in blender render mode to access this setting)]
It made me RMA the 480, and get an XFX ATI 5870 1gb. This proved to run extremely well in Blenders opengl viewport, though selection lag of objects at semi-higher poly counts became unbearable to me - with lags up to 30 seconds or more on 2 or three million poly scenes. This is due to the deprecated gl_select method used in Blender, which is not supported through hardware in Ati drivers.
To cut a long story short: at my breaking point of almost deciding to switch to another app, Psy-Fi developed an occlusion-based selection patch to save the day! Gotta love the dev community. I am now using Bat3a’s optimized build, and it’s been Blender opengl performance heaven for me.
Read up on it here: http://tinyurl.com/7feccp7
Now for the benchmarking. Truth be told, I did a little more than just some simple benchmarks, and decided to compare Blender’s viewport performance in different benchmark scenes. I also included a production model from Project London (thanks to the Project London guys for the share!) Suffice to say, I made some interesting observations - and some combinations of how things are setup in a scene can completely kill your viewport performance (no matter what type or brand of graphics card you are using!).
These issues are problematic in a production environment, and, in my opinion, should be addressed. Snazzy new features are awesome, but if some of the basic functionality in its current state breaks the production workflow, I feel it is time to bring them to the attention of the devs and the community.
Here’s my system specs:
Asus p6t Deluxe SAS v1 motherboard
Intel i7 920 overclocked @ 3.6ghz
48gb ram (6x8gb Ripjaws X)
Revodrive x2 240gb system drive (up to 1.5gb/sec transfer rate)
Windows 7 Professional 64 bit
5870: latest 12.1 catalyst drivers
7970: 8.921.2 RC11 AMD Radeon™ HD 7900 drivers
The spreadsheet with all the benchmark results can be viewed at:
http://tinyurl.com/6ttgkvp
So, let’s have a (furry) ball!
Introduction to the new AMD 7970
First some photos:
Simple packaging (how I like it - enough waste as it is).
The video card itself.
And after installing it in my case. It’s a long card, and I had to reposition one of the hard drives to make it fit.
Generic OpenGL Benchmarks
Cinebench
A good standard opengl performance benchmark. I expected higher frame rates, since the 7970 is (on paper) way faster than the 5870. Much to my surprise, I got almost identical results:
I am not too sure what is going on here. It might be due to the rather ‘virgin’ state of the 7970 drivers; these are not yet integrated in the main 12.1 drivers, and during the benchmarks, I felt like the opengl drivers were almost an afterthought by AMD. Perhaps they have decided to cripple the opengl drivers as well. Or the test is cpu-limited.
Notwithstanding the current state of the drivers, I really expected better opengl performance in this test, and this was a major disappointment.
Unigine Heaven
I tested both cards in opengl mode with AA disabled at 1920x1200. I also tested DirectX11 with 4xAA at 1920x1200. Both Full screen.
A marked difference. About twice as fast, which is what I expected. Still, the beta state of the 7970 driver is also visible in this benchmark. With better opengl drivers this should be higher - the hardware can do better. Notice the DX11 performance at 4xAA - on par with opengl without any AA.
Tessmark
For good measure I tested the tesselation performance (no AA at 1920x1200).
Again, excellent results for the 7970, especially at higher polygon levels.
MSI Kombustor
An interesting all-round opengl test, comprised of several benchmarks.
…and a total fail. This benchmark truly demonstrates the undeveloped state of the opengl drivers: performance is either underwhelming (wavy plane and tessy spheres), or the benchmark will not run. The Kmark Extreme benchmark could not initialize shaders, and refused to start. The tessy spheres benchmark stuttered like crazy.
Not good. Not good at all. AMD needs to work on the opengl drivers.
Geeks3D_OpenGL_Instancing
A opengl benchmark to test hardware-based opengl object instancing.
Results for the 5870.
I did not include these in the final benchmark spreadsheet, because testing this on the 7970 caused a complete system-wide crash (or rather: screen-freeze). It leads me to think that opengl instancing is still not supported very well in the current 7970 drivers. Again a FAIL for the 7970.
OpenCL performance
Naturally I was very interested in the opencl performance of my new 7970. I use Luxrender quite a lot, and Luxrender support hybrid cpu/gpu opencl rendering. To benchmark the opencl performance, I used Luxmark v2.0.
Nice, but again I expected much better results seeing the hardware specs of the 7970. Although an almost twice as fast unbiased render time is nothing to balk about.
ps: notice the differences between the older 11.8 and newest 12.1 drivers.
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