3Dlabs Permedia 3 Create!

Graphics clock vs CPU clock

In professional rendering applications, the core clock of your graphics processor isn’t a very important consideration to take into account. Since we’re not dealing with fill rates in most high-end applications, a higher graphics clock won’t improve performance all that much. To give an example of the relative insignificance of the graphics clock, NVIDIA’s TNT2 rendered the test scenes only a few seconds faster than the old TNT, which is essentially a TNT2 clocked at 90MHz. Continuing on that trend, there was no noticeable difference in 3D Studio Max rendering times between a regular TNT2 clocked at 125MHz and a TNT2 Ultra clocked at 150MHz, and there was barely any difference between those two and the Hercules’ Dynamite TNT2 Ultra clocked at 175MHz. The same situation applied for the Voodoo3 2000 and 3000, as well as the S3 Savage4 and the Savage4 PRO+. The basic conclusion that can be made here is that the only benefit you’re going to see from a faster graphics clock (i.e. a TNT2 Ultra vs a regular TNT2) will be provided in your system’s gaming performance, and not reflected in it’s high-end professional application performance.

As we just finished discussing, a card’s polygon rate is the thing to consider when dealing with professional 3D rendering applications so for those applications, the more important consideration is the speed of your CPU. The Permedia 3, for example, is capable of a polygon setup rate of 11 Million polygons per second and a processing rate of 2 Million polygons per second only if paired up with a Pentium III 500. When armed with the power of a Pentium III 500 the Permedia 3 lives up to its expectations and dominates over the rest of the competition. However if you take that power away from it, and replace it with a slower 300MHz Pentium II, the picture changes quite a bit. With that settled, it’s time to discuss a topic favored by 3Dlabs for soon to be obvious reasons.