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The Ultimate GPU Benchmark (2000 - 2002)

Published: (last update )


No more modern graphic cards, let's ge back a bit to revisit some trully famous pieces of history. In this article, we will get back to year 2000. Starting with Voodoo4 and up to GeForce4 Ti and Radeon 9000 Series.

Introduction

This project has a complicated history. It all started in 2012, yes, that's right - 12 years ago. At start the methodology was very time consuming. 12 settings per game and card across almost 30 games. Also at the time this was one very large project with very wide range of GPUs. The weakest ones were planned to be Rage 128 Pro / Riva TNT2 Ultra and Voodoo4. The cut-off point at the other end was meant to be Radeon X850 XT and GeForce 6800 Ultra. Later, I extended the top end to Radeon X1800 XL and GeForce 7800 GT, as these cards are not that different performance wise and in different articles they are completely in a shadow of GeForce 8 and Radeon HD Series.

Obviously, it is pretty much impossible to create a methodology that would cover such wide selection of hardware without CPU bottlenecks and using "modern" technologies like shaders. Therefore I selected games and settings that would be suitable for older GPUs and different set of games / settings for the more modern ones. Everything in one results spreadsheet. The weak HW would only run the less demanding games and the more powerful category would run everything. With the methodology pretty much complete, I started the benchmarking. You can imagine it was very time consuming. The years went by and the finish line was still far away. It took few dozen hours to complete one GPU... and there were 50 of them :D

I took many breaks over time, spent time on another projects and this one remained unfinished. During that time I worked on the succeeding series of GPU benchmarks starting at 2004 and up to 2013 (these are all complete and published). While doing the later benchmarks, I figured it would be good to backport some new ideas to the old methodology for AGP cards. 3DMark feature tests, AA/AF performance loss and even recording footage for GPU Duels (at my YT channel) - all this was added. Of course it required some amount of rebenching and increasing the time requirements even further. At one point, I decided to scrap the whole thing and leave it unfinished as the amount of time needed was insane.

But ultimately I went over the methodology again and did number of cuts to greatly reduce the amount of work to finish. Some games were cut out completely (inconsistent performance or difficult to measure). The two categories of GPUs got separated and less demanding games were removed from the faster HW group. There is not much point in benchmarking Quake 3 on GeForce 6800, is it? :D And the last measure that saved plenty of time - I didn't measure fps in games / settings that scored less than 10 fps. These steps helped me to finish the project in reasonable amount of time. This is the part one with GPUs up to GeForce4 Ti 4600 and Radeon 9500. Cut-off year is 2002. Later, there will be second article with DX8 and DX9 hardware.





Test System - AGP 4×/8×
Test System - PCI-E
Test System - AGP 2×

Test System - Hardware

The test system was chosen to provide the best possible performance for AGP cards. ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2 with overclocked Pentium E5700 should be more than enough. As a side effect, PCI-E cards can be tested on this system as well, albeit with slightly reduced performance (only 4 PCI-E lanes and slightly slower CPU). The CPU has BSEL mod applied to report FSB 266 (1066) as default. This allows memory divider 1:1 to be used and increases memory performance greatly. Apparently, the PT880 Ultra chipset is unstable at FSB > 266 MHz if PCI-E GPU is used. Also this board for some reason doesn't allow "half" multipliers. Therefore Fro PCI-E, 14×266 was used as a closest possible frequency.

Voodoo5 5500 AGP and Kyro 2 can't run on AGP 4×/8× board. And due to some incompatibility, neither can GeForce GT 610 PCI (but this one will be in the next article). I took Pentium 4 Northwood on SiS 651 chipset that is the fastest platform with 3.3V AGP support.

For AGP 4×/8× cards


For PCI-E cards


For Voodoo5 5500 AGP, Kyro 2, GeForce GT610 PCI

Test System - OS and Drivers




Test System - Games




Voodoo5 5500 PCI


Tested Video Cards

Voodoo4 4500 PCIVoodoo4 4500 AGPVoodoo4 4800 AGPVoodoo5 5500 AGPP650Parhelia AGP 8×Radeon 7000Radeon SDR
GPUVSA-100VSA-100VSA-1002 × VSA-100Parhelia-LXParhelia-512RV100R100
ArchitectureVSAVSAVSAVSAMGAMGAR1xxR1xx
Technology250 nm250 nm250 nm250 nm150 nm150 nm180 nm180 nm
Die Size112 mm2112 mm2112 mm22 × 112 mm2-174 mm280 mm2114 mm2
Transistor Count14 mil.14 mil.14 mil.2 × 14 mil.80 mil.80 mil.-30 mil.
Transistor Density0.12 mil. / mm20.12 mil. / mm20.12 mil. / mm20.12 mil. / mm2-0.46 mil. / mm2-0.26 mil. / mm2
GPU Clock166 MHz166 MHz183 MHz166 MHz230 MHz250 MHz183 MHz160 MHz
ROPs2222 × 22412
TMUs2222 × 281636
Shaders----2 PS + 2 VS4 PS + 4 VS--
Memory32 MB SDR32 MB SDR64 MB SDR2 × 32 MB SDR64 MB DDR128 MB DDR32 MB DDR32 MB SDR
Memory Clock166 MHz166 MHz183 MHz166 MHz460 MHz600 MHz366 MHz160 MHz
Bus Width128 bit128 bit128 bit2 × 128 bit128 bit256 bit64 bit128 bit
Memory Bandwidth2.7 GB/s2.7 GB/s2.9 GB/s2 × 2.7 GB/s7.4 GB/s19.2 GB/s2.9 GB/s2.6 GB/s
Fillrate (Pixel)332 MP/s332 MP/s366 MP/s2 × 332 MP/s460 MP/s1000 MP/s183 MP/s320 MP/s
Fillrate (Texel)332 MT/s332 MT/s366 MT/s2 × 332 MT/s1840 MT/s4000 MT/s549 MT/s960 MT/s
Bus TypePCIAGP 4×AGP 4×AGPAGP 8×AGP 8×AGP 4×AGP 4×
TDP15 W15 W15 W30 W---30 W
DirectX6/76/76/76/78.18.177
OpenGL1.11.11.11.11.31.31.31.3
Launch Year20002000200020002003200220012000


Radeon DDR VIVORadeon 7500Radeon 8500Radeon 9000Radeon 9000 ProRadeon 9100Radeon 9200 SERadeon 9500
GPUR100RV200R200RV250RV250R200RV250R300
ArchitectureR1xxR1xxR2xxR2xxR2xxR2xxR2xxR3xx / 4xx
Technology180 nm150 nm150 nm150 nm150 nm150 nm150 nm150 nm
Die Size114 mm284 mm2140 mm281 mm281 mm2140 mm281 mm2218 mm2
Transistor Count30 mil.30 mil.60 mil.36 mil.36 mil.60 mil.36 mil.107 mil.
Transistor Density0.26 mil. / mm20.36 mil. / mm20.43 mil. / mm20.44 mil. / mm20.44 mil. / mm20.43 mil. / mm20.44 mil. / mm20.49 mil. / mm2
GPU Clock183 MHz290 MHz275 MHz250 MHz275 MHz250 MHz200 MHz275 MHz
ROPs22444444
TMUs66844844
Shaders--4 PS + 2 VS4 PS + 1 VS4 PS + 1 VS4 PS + 2 VS4 PS + 1 VS4 PS + 4 VS
Memory64 MB DDR64 MB DDR64 MB DDR64 MB DDR64 MB DDR128 MB DDR128 MB DDR64 MB DDR
Memory Clock366 MHz460 MHz550 MHz400 MHz550 MHz500 MHz333 MHz540 MHz
Bus Width128 bit128 bit128 bit128 bit128 bit128 bit64 bit128 bit
Memory Bandwidth5.9 GB/s7.4 GB/s8.8 GB/s6.4 GB/s8.8 GB/s8 GB/s2.7 GB/s8.6 GB/s
Fillrate (Pixel)366 MP/s580 MP/s1100 MP/s1000 MP/s1100 MP/s1000 MP/s800 MP/s1100 MP/s
Fillrate (Texel)1098 MT/s1740 MT/s2200 MT/s1000 MT/s1100 MT/s2000 MT/s800 MT/s1100 MT/s
Bus TypeAGP 4×AGP 4×AGP 4×AGP 4×AGP 4×AGP 4×AGP 8×AGP 8×
TDP30 W-------
DirectX778.18.18.18.18.19.0
OpenGL1.31.31.41.41.41.41.42.0
Launch Year20002001200120022002200320032002


GeForce 256 SDRGeForce 256 DDRQuadro SDRGeForce2 MXGeForce2 MX 400GeForce2 GTSGeForce2 UltraGeForce3 Ti200
GPUNV10NV10NV10NV11NV11NV15NV15NV20
ArchitectureNV1xNV1xNV1xNV1xNV1xNV1xNV1xNV2x
Technology220 nm220 nm220 nm180 nm180 nm180 nm180 nm150 nm
Die Size139 mm2139 mm2139 mm265 mm265 mm289 mm289 mm2145 mm2
Transistor Count23 mil.23 mil.23 mil.19 mil.19 mil.25 mil.25 mil.57 mil.
Transistor Density0.17 mil. / mm20.17 mil. / mm20.17 mil. / mm20.29 mil. / mm20.29 mil. / mm20.28 mil. / mm20.28 mil. / mm20.39 mil. / mm2
GPU Clock120 MHz120 MHz135 MHz175 MHz200 MHz200 MHz250 MHz175 MHz
ROPs44422444
TMUs44444888
Shaders-------4 PS + 1 VS
Memory32 MB SDR32 MB DDR64 MB SDR32 MB SDR64 MB SDR32 MB DDR64 MB DDR64 MB DDR
Memory Clock166 MHz300 MHz166 MHz166 MHz200 MHz333 MHz460 MHz400 MHz
Bus Width128 bit128 bit128 bit128 bit128 bit128 bit128 bit128 bit
Memory Bandwidth2.7 GB/s4.8 GB/s2.7 GB/s2.7 GB/s3.2 GB/s5.3 GB/s7.4 GB/s6.4 GB/s
Fillrate (Pixel)480 MP/s480 MP/s540 MP/s350 MP/s400 MP/s800 MP/s1000 MP/s700 MP/s
Fillrate (Texel)480 MT/s480 MT/s540 MT/s700 MT/s800 MT/s1600 MT/s2000 MT/s1400 MT/s
Bus TypeAGP 4×AGP 4×AGP 4×AGP 4×AGP 4×AGP 4×AGP 4×AGP 4×
TDP20 W20 W20 W18 W20 W33 W-35 W
DirectX77777778
OpenGL1.21.21.21.21.21.21.21.3
Launch Year19991999199920002001200020002001


GeForce3 Ti500GeForce4 MX440 SEGeForce4 MX460GeForce4 Ti4200GeForce4 Ti4600GeForce FX 5200 64-bitGeForce FX 5200GeForce FX 5600Kyro 2
GPUNV20NV18NV17NV25NV25NV34NV34NV31STG4500
ArchitectureNV2xNV1xNV1xNV2xNV2xNV3xNV3xNV3xKyro
Technology150 nm150 nm150 nm150 nm150 nm150 nm150 nm150 nm180 nm
Die Size145 mm265 mm265 mm2150 mm2150 mm291 mm291 mm2135 mm271 mm2
Transistor Count57 mil.29 mil.29 mil.63 mil.63 mil.47 mil.47 mil.80 mil.15 mil.
Transistor Density0.39 mil. / mm2--0.42 mil. / mm20.42 mil. / mm20.52 mil. / mm20.52 mil. / mm20.59 mil. / mm20.21 mil. / mm2
GPU Clock240 MHz275 MHz300 MHz250 MHz300 MHz250 MHz250 MHz325 MHz175 MHz
ROPs422444442
TMUs844884442
Shaders4 PS + 1 VS--4 PS + 2 VS4 PS + 2 VS4 PS + 2 VS4 PS + 2 VS4 PS + 2 VS-
Memory64 MB DDR64 MB DDR64 MB DDR64 MB DDR128 MB DDR128 MB DDR128 MB DDR128 MB DDR64 MB SDR
Memory Clock500 MHz266 MHz550 MHz512 MHz650 MHz333 MHz400 MHz550 MHz175 MHz
Bus Width128 bit64 bit128 bit128 bit128 bit64 bit128 bit128 bit128 bit
Memory Bandwidth8 GB/s2.1 GB/s8.8 GB/s8.2 GB/s10.4 GB/s2.7 GB/s6.4 GB/s8.8 GB/s2.8 GB/s
Fillrate (Pixel)960 MP/s550 MP/s600 MP/s1000 MP/s1200 MP/s1000 MP/s1000 MP/s1300 MP/s350 MP/s
Fillrate (Texel)1920 MT/s1100 MT/s1200 MT/s2000 MT/s2400 MT/s1000 MT/s1000 MT/s1300 MT/s350 MT/s
Bus TypeAGP 4×AGP 8×AGP 4×AGP 4×AGP 4×AGP 8×AGP 8×AGP 8×AGP 2×
TDP43 W-25 W33 W45 W25 W25 W37 W10 W
DirectX8778.18.19.09.09.07
OpenGL1.31.21.21.31.31.51.51.51.2
Launch Year20012002??2002200220022003200320032001



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