GTX470 Performance Test Part 1: Windows XP
Hidden Super-Sampling
While this article was being written, a very interesting finding was made, that of hidden super-sampling present on the GTX470/GTX480.
Essentially by using TrAA (SS), the entire scene receives super-sampling, not just alpha textures. This works in OpenGL and in DX10/DX11. I noticed something was up in OpenGL anyway, so I disabled TrAA on the GTX470 to make it behave like the GTX285. But given I used TrMS/TrSS in every Direct3D title, I had to be sure it wasn’t happening in DX9 on XP.
Well after extensive testing, I can confirm all of the results are legitimate. SSAA is not being applied to the entire scene with TrMS/TrSS in DX9 on XP. That is to say, TrMS/TrSS behaves the same way it does on the GTX285, providing you keep the level in lock-step with the base MSAA level, which I did.
To double-check, I took some TrSS screenshots in some DX9 titles, and I can confirm super-sampling is only being applied to transparent textures, but nowhere else.
To triple-check, I disabled TrAA on the GTX470 and retested some of the games where it was slower (Call of Duty 2/4/5, UT 2004 and Bioshock 1), but the GTX470 was still unable to match the GTX285’s original score with TrAA.
So as far as these results go, I’m 100% confident they’re accurate as far as Windows XP goes.
Image quality in OpenGL titles is absolutely gorgeous with SSAA, and I’ll cover the hidden super-sampling (and other topics) in more depth in a future article concerning image quality.
Surely this is a driver issue. As gamers we want to play our old games as well as our new one’s.
Part of the fun of upgrading is that we get to see an FPS boost in our old games.
Tesselation is all well and good, but no-body is using it yet and I hope there is a higher take up of DX11 than there was of DX10.
Gearing a card for the future is all well and good but predicting the future isn’t exactly an exact science!
I agree completely. Fortunately I’ve seen this issue many times before, and the good news is that driver improvements can fix things.
The GTX285 has “gold standard” driver performance, so it’s tough for any new release driver to compete with it initially.
What will be really interesting is how Windows 7 compares.
To the above – but the GTX470 performs well on Windows 7. It seems that nVidia have rightfully given up on xp.
We’ll see about that, Bakes.
Windows 7 might not change things at all because I don’t benchmark like the standard fare. I use far more games, along with unorthodox gaming settings compared to regular reviews.
As always, outstanding job BFG10K.
Any “early leaks” from the Win7 results? 😉
Yeah, so far Windows 7 is behaving differently in some of the games.
It seems that many of the older games are so dependent on the TMU muscle for performance.
After looking at the “Part 2” Win7 comparison, I see that Prey, Doom 3, and Far Cry 2 perform so much better but UT2004, one of my favorites, performs considerably worse (maybe after Nvidia fixed it thanks to you pointing out the stuttering issue on Vista a while ago, so it’s still a driver problem?). Overall, Win7 is much better though (except for a few unrelated sound issues).
thanks, great article!
The Unreal 2 engine stuttering was only present on XP, and was later fixed. I don’t think the low UT2004 performance is related in any way, but rather the problem is specific to the GF100, on both OSes.