Geometry/Vertex Shader Performance

There's more to the DirectX pipeline than just pure pixel shader performance though – here, we use a combination of geometry and vertex shader-bound tests to determine RV770's performance in these areas.




AMD's geometry shader performance starts out strong in RightMark3D 2.0, with the Radeon HD 4870 knocking at the heels of Nvidia's flagship GeForce GTX 280 graphics card. The Radeon HD 4850, on the other hand, is in a different league to Nvidia's competing hardware in these tests, but it's not all plain sailing for the ATI cards. As soon as we jump into the 3DMark Vantage geometry shader test, performance takes a turn for the worse - the test is dominated by Nvidia hardware.



Dropping back into RightMark3D for the vertex texture fetch tests swings things back the other way - now we have a situation where the Radeons dominate proceedings and the Radeon HD 4870 X2 drops in with some rather sick scores. What's more, both the 4850 and 4870 are faster than Nvidia's GeForce GTX 280 in the two tests.