XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB XXX Edition Video Card

Lightsmark 2007

LIGHTSMARK is a new benchmark/demo with real-time global illumination and penumbra shadows created by Stepan Hrbek. Lightsmark version 1.3 was used as it contains new rendering paths for ATI Radeon HD 2xxx and 38XX series graphics cards. Before version 1.3 was released, the ATI Radeon HD 38xx series video cards were unable to render objects in the benchmark.

Benchmark Features:

• realtime global illumination
• realtime penumbra shadows
• realtime color bleeding
• infinite light bounces
• fully dynamic HDR lighting
• 220000 triangles in scene

It should be noted that ATI questioned our use of this benchmark as the developer is a private individual that never contacted developer relations at ATI. ATI also made it clear to us that although this benchmark uses global illumination, that it is not similar to the DX10.1 demo that ATI been showing. ATI isn’t sure how the benchmark is made as they have not had time to look into it, but if its rendering to cube maps then its likely that performance could be increased if the app used DX10.1’s indexed cube maps.

To be fair to both side we contacted the creator of Lightsmark 2007 and Stepan Hrbek had this to say.

“I developed it with 3 Radeon and 3 GeForce cards, randomly switching them, there are no special optimizations, IMHO it’s fair. I bought all 6 cards, no gifts.. Small unfairness is only in quality. The same shader on Nvidia card produces smoother shadows but I don’t give Nvidia any bonus points for quality, only fps is measured. It uses completely new technique where part of calculation runs on CPU, drivers were not optimized for it for years, so it’s possible that it hits some unoptimized driver code. But both companies are in the same situation.”

Since we ran the test, we will go ahead and include it, but what the results mean is up in the air.

Benchmark Results: The XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB XXX edition performed better than the GeForce 8800 Ultra in this new benchmark, which is a bit shocking. This is one of the first benchmarks that uses global illumination and realtime penumbra shadows, so these results are new and interesting. This is the only benchmark in out testing that the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB beat out the GeForce 8800 Ultra. While this is strange for sure, the benchmark showed the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB to be 14.5% faster than the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB – so the scaling doesn’t seem to be off.

Benchmark Results: With the resolution increased to 1600×1200, the XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB XXX edition broke 270 frames per seconds and was once again in the lead. Even if this benchmark is not ‘fair’ to ATI and NVIDIA cards, it at least shows the differences between the NVIDIA cards and the ATI cards when looking at just one brand at a time.