From
www.rage3d.com
"My bud Gldm at Ace's Hardware has gotten himself onto the main page. It's about poly intensive apps and the usefulness of Hyper-Z. I'm going to rip the whole post cause it's interesting but you can continue the discussion here
I've been having other people run my ultra.cfg ultimate Q3 quality settings. Basically designed to test "next generation" game loads with up to 10x the poly count and 4x the texture load.
Interesting stuff is this (all results in 640x480x32, demo1):
My Athlon 700 with Geforce DDR: 27.4
An Athlon 700 with V5 5500: 25.2
Athlon 1.1 with V5 6k: 38.2
Athlon 1.1 with GF2 Ultra: 40.3
Athlon 700 with Radeon 64DDR: 77.2
You know what I've figured out? When poly count starts going up, z-buffer becomes a serious bottleneck because there's many more polys and they all need Z-tests. ATI's Hyper-Z may have MUCH bigger implications than its getting credit for when the T&L accelerated games come out.
Test file used (copy and paste to a cfg file, exec from console. Overrides all settings but resolution):
set r_primitives "0"
set r_facePlaneCull "1"
set r_swapInterval "0"
set r_textureMode "GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR"
set r_finish "0"
set r_dlightBacks "1"
set r_dynamiclight "1"
set r_drawSun "0"
set r_fastsky "0"
set r_ignoreGLErrors "1"
set r_flares "1"
set r_lodbias "-32767"
set r_lodCurveError "32767"
set r_ignoreFastPath "1"
set r_subdivisions "1"
set r_vertexLight "0"
set r_simpleMipMaps "0"
set r_depthbits "24"
set r_stencilbits "8"
set r_colorbits "32"
set r_texturebits "32"
set r_detailtextures "1"
set r_roundImagesDown "0"
set r_picmip "0"
set r_ext_texture_env_add "1"
set r_ext_compiled_vertex_array "1"
set r_ext_multitexture "1"
set r_ext_compress_textures "0"
set r_allowExtensions "1"
set cg_shadows "2"
set cg_drawFPS "1"
set cg_simpleItems "0"
set cg_lagometer "1"
set cm_playerCurveClip "1"
You might want to give this a try to confirm results. Nvidia's NV15 level in their demo sectoin should prove interesting too. The radeon got 18.7 on it, I get about 7.3 both with my cfg. Note this level peaks at over 125,000 polys with these settings. Demo1 only gets to around 20,000-25,000. (normally 3000-6000 on High Quality)"