MSI GeForce 3 Ti500 Pro-VTG (MS-8854)

Vulpine and GL Excess

This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.

GLmark is a benchmarking program that is intended to test the performance and visual quality delivered by modern 3D accelerators in a “real world” setting. It is important to point out that GLmark is based entirely on the OpenGL graphics API. Given the fact that both performance and compatibility of many graphics cards´ OpenGL drivers differ significantly from their Direct3D counterparts, we consider it necessary to determine OpenGL and Direct3D performance independently from one another.

Vulpine® GLmark is a comprehensive benchmark platform, based on a commercially sold, freely licensable high-performance 3D engine that will be used in a number of forthcoming games. It takes full advantage of an extremely wide variety of features provided by the graphics card, including support for the latest extensions to the OpenGL standard, like Texture Shaders and Vertex Programs. Multiple compatibility modes make it possible to compare multiple generations of 3D accelerators under identical conditions, and a stylish demo mode with sound track provides a truly stunning audio-visual experience.

This is the fist time that I used this benchmark and I must admit I like it quite allot, the visuals are very smooth, detailed and is for OpenGL as 3D Mark is for Direct 3D.

As you can see by the above scores, both Ti500 cards are on par with each other; with only 1 point difference at 1024X768 and at the two higher resolution the gap is so small you could put it in the error margin. The main reason that the scores were so close is because just like 3D Mark 2000 Vulpine GL Mark utilizes the CPU to an extent that the video card is not the limiting factor. Even at the higher resolutions we achieved 48 fps, this is quite respectable and the images were completely smooth without any stuttering.

GL Excess

GL Excess is a multi-scene OpenGL benchmark put together by a young Italian programmerc called Paolo Martella; it’s a very nice tool that gives you allot of information rather than just frame rate.

As you can see from the above results a trend is starting to appear with OpenGL based benchmarks, in that the two Ti500 based cards are basically performing the same, this is because OpenGL is very dependant on the CPU, and because of this even the GeForce 3 stands up against the Ti500’s very well.