General Shading, Large Texture Set and Power
General Shading
Large Texture Set
We originally engineered a test that loaded large (~250MB optimised) meshes onto the GPU and drew them (using D3D, a few hundrew DIP calls on 64K submeshes inside the bigger one), to test situations where VRAM usage was over 1GiB, but it seems either our app misbehaves inside both IHV's drivers, or the drivers themselves aren't too hot. Performance was horrible even with ~500MB of VRAM usage with frequent app crashes as the indexed mesh was drawn (at random). So we switched to a test that drew large 2K textures tiled onto a partially zoomed out flat mesh instead. Both drivers were happy to load over 1GiB of unique large textures and draw them, and performance was roughly as expected. Not a perfect test because the drivers for both boards are more optimised for VS perf in the general case (so we imagine), but one which pushes VRAM limits nonetheless.
Power Draw
We dropped each board into a different system (just one processor, 8GiB non-fully buffered DDR2) to test power draw, since it was a system we have other data for which helped us make our guess at the board's power draw earlier in the article. This graph shows at-the-wall full-system performance under heavy graphics load for each board.
