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 GT200's performance in these areas.



Both geometry shader tests from RightMark 3D 2.0 show some decent performance improvements, although it's the Hyperlight test in particular that shows the biggest increase over the previous generation hardware. In this particular test, we saw an increase of 142 percent over the GeForce 9800 GTX and almost 170 percent over the GeForce 8800 Ultra.

While that's not a direct relationship to the six-fold stream out buffer sizeup, it's definitely a significant improvement in performance. On the other hand, the Galaxy test showed the GeForce GTX 280 was around 43 percent faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX, while it's 57 percent faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra.


3DMark Vantage's GPU Cloth test gives us a combination of Vertex Shader and Geometry Shader performance all wrapped into one. Because of that, the performance advantages aren't quite as profound as they were in the Hyperlight geometry shader bound test, but the GeForce GTX 280 proved to deliver 13 percent more performance than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, while it was also 20 percent faster than the GeForce 9800 GTX.



Vertex Texture Fetch performance hasn't improved drastically based on RightMark 3D 2.0's two vertex texture fetch tests. We saw an 11 percent performance increase over the GeForce 9800 GTX in the Earth test, while the Waves test showed an 18 percent advantage over the GeForce 8800 Ultra.

Interestingly, the Radeon HD 3870 X2's vertex texture fetch performance is pretty incredible in the Waves test, where it's over 60 percent faster than the GeForce GTX 280.