# NVidia Cards and glxgears

## mellofone

I just got a new NVidia Geforce4 and was wondering how it stacks up agianst some different cards. Is glxgears actually a good way of reporting FPS? If not, what else can I use?

Can some others post their FPS as a reference? Thanks.

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## mksoft

Using Nvidia Geforce2 MX, glxgears reports ~775 FPS

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## mellofone

 *mksoft wrote:*   

> Using Nvidia Geforce2 MX, glxgears reports ~775 FPS

 

Cool. Using a GF4 Ti4400 ~ 4445 FPS

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## mksoft

 *mellofone wrote:*   

> Cool. Using a GF4 Ti4400 ~ 4445 FPS

 

Hope you have a fire extinguisher nearby  :Very Happy: 

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## mellofone

 *mksoft wrote:*   

> Hope you have a fire extinguisher nearby 

 

Heh. Yeah. I have a "customized cooling solution".

A dremmel and a load of extra fans   :Twisted Evil: 

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## dek

I'm getting ~5785 fps on a Gainward GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB. But i don't think glxgears is a good tool for testing your videocard. It don't even uses textures..

btw: Anyone knows a good resource for OpenGL demos working with Linux ? I really miss this kind of eye-candy. The only thing i know of is xscreensaver and a few xmms plugins.

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## SuperTomate

 *dek wrote:*   

> btw: Anyone knows a good resource for OpenGL demos working with Linux ? I really miss this kind of eye-candy. The only thing i know of is xscreensaver and a few xmms plugins.

 

You can try  SPECviewperf.

It's a (or the) reference for OpenGL tests.

Note : you have to use v6.1.2 as v7.0 doesn't exist yet for Unix/Linux.

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## Forge

You can run the Nvidia demos under Wine. They're all OpenGL based and should work well.

glxgears was designed to show you if you're using hardware GL or software GL. Using it for anything more than that is asking for difficulty. Resolution and color depth impact glxgears fps strongly, as well. at 640x480 16 bit, I get around 12000fps. At my normal 1280x1024*2 32bit desktop, I get about 6000.

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## sn0man1

I have been unsuccessful in doing this, I can get the installer progress to go, but it hangs.  I have tried dawn and time and vulcan, all with no luck.  I got twister actually installed but I could not get it to run.  I emerged the latest wine, so I dont know what else to try.

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## Forge

sn0man - Look at the date of my post, then look at when the demos you are trying were released.

The newest demos don't work? Bummer. The ones I was referring to, do work. I personally ran Tree, Grove, and Beast, and I think I had Wolfman running.

As for the installer? I use a kludgy mess of Wine and VMware to get apps installed and then run. I use a real partition which Linux can read/write, with a Win2k install on it. I boot that in VMware and install things to my heart's content. AFTER that, I then run the apps in Wine (since VMware abstracts the bejesus out of everything, no 3D support).

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## AgenT

I would venture to say that glxgears is a useless benchmark of video card performance. All it is is 3 gears going as fast as possible. An (really outdated) benchmark like this will probably show you CPU performance more than video card performance. Why? Because the less heavy a benchmark is on a video card, the more it depends on the CPU since the video card will not perform to its fullest extent because it will just wait on the CPU to catch up.

Of course all benchmarks are more or less CPU bound, but the less technical the benchmark, the more CPU based it usually is. Just notice how, if you have an older card (for example Geforce3) and upgrade it to the top of the line card (whatever that is now), but you keep the CPU the same, a game will not give you better FPS if you use low-res/bad graphic options. But if you play in high res and super details, you will probably get more FPS (how much more, once again, depends on you CPU).

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## Forge

While your theory is sound, glxgears is almost always fillrate, not CPU, bound. You can see this by resizing the window to nearly nothing or placing it offscreen. This means the computations are still done, but the GPU wastes no time trying to draw it. Typically framerates double. I personally go from around 10K fps to around 20K, just by minimizing the rendering window to the  taskbar.

P4 2.8C@3.4, GeForce FX 5900 Ultra

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## pYrania

Well, i get around 1650 FPS with my gf4 440mx at no cpu load

and when compiling a kernel i get this:

75 frames in 6.0 seconds = 12.500 FPS

using 2.4.21-ck3 here.

so hm. you said the cpu doesn't interference glxgears? well...

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## Forge

No, that wasn't what I said at all. I said the CPU isn't the LIMIT to the top fps. Seeing as you have no CPU load while running glxgears, that tells me your CPU is much, much too powerful for that GF4 MX. The GF4 MX simply doesn't have a lot of fillrate, so your CPU isn't getting worked up filling it with data.

Now, with NO CPU available at all, you'll get 0 fps, since the cards gets no data to draw. All your 'while compiling kernel' fps tells me is that your kernel compile/GCC are *very* good at maxing out your CPU. If you want to see what your CPU *could* do in glxgears, minimize/obscure the rendering window. That runs the CPU part (setup triangles for the scene), without running the graphics hardware side (draw the object onscreen).

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## pYrania

Interesting. Really interesting.

But this box has an AMD TB 800 and i am quite sure the gpu is much faster then the cpu.

i could be mistaken anyway.

with a minimized glxgears window i get ~4700 fps.

so, if even if my gpu would be capable of doing 5000 fps, it won't come to this point, because the cpu is slowing it down by supplying it with far too less packets.

nice, indeed a fact i didn't know yet, even so it sounds logic.

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## Forge

 *Quote:*   

> with a minimized glxgears window i get ~4700 fps. 

 

Your CPU can output almost 5000 fps of setup data.

 *Quote:*   

> Well, i get around 1650 FPS with my gf4 440mx at no cpu load

 

Your graphics card is capable of roughly 2000fps at your resolution/refresh/AA/AF levels. Using a lower desktop resolution, no AA/AF, and/or a lower color depth may increase this, which is why you should only ever compare glxgears results with someone with the *exact* same res/refresh/quality settings. Even a different refresh rate makes a tiny difference, since it takes a tiny fraction of the GPU's time to redraw the screen. Heck, even your desktop background and number of icons/apps/buttons visible can have an effect, though it's likely to be in the single digits, and thus irrelevant.

 *Quote:*   

> and when compiling a kernel i get this:
> 
> 75 frames in 6.0 seconds = 12.500 FPS

 

Like I said, means your GCC and setup can max out your CPU *really* well, I meant it as a compliment. My system can still manage a few hundred fps while compiling, though HT may have something to do with that.

SO, the long and short of the point I was trying to make:

glxgears is currently used as a simple test to see if hardware 3D accel is working or not. It's extreme variation based on the enviroment makes it unacceptably easy to influence, though, making it a useless benchmark, per se. If you get low hundreds of fps, you're probably doing software OpenGL, if you get thousands, you're using hardware. If you get tens of thousands, you have a high end Nvidia-based rig. (ATI seems to have missed some [probably pointless] optimizations Nvidia did. Their glxgears scores are *always* lower, even when their performance is similar in real games/apps.)  :Smile: 

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## pYrania

thanks in advance for all those information.

just one more little question that isn't related to this directly. Hope you know even this little fact  :Razz: 

Is the AGP 4x really four times faster than AGP 1x, or, what i guess, is it just quad pumped?

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## AgenT

 *Quote:*   

> ...making it a useless benchmark...

 

All that mombo jumbo from all these posts and this is where it gets us? At least we, more or less, agree with each other  :Smile: 

 *Quote:*   

> Is the AGP 4x really four times faster than AGP 1x, or, what i guess, is it just quad pumped?

  I have no idea what you are asking here. How is it that saying 4x is "quad pumped", which I take it meaning that 1x is 'single pumped', not make it 4x "faster"? You probably need to restate what you are talking about when you say "faster". But just to save you the trouble, having a 4x video card will NOT make it 4x faster than having the exact same card but having it use 1x in the "real world" (apps, games, etc.). However, I will say that the more advanced/faster a card is, the better technology it needs to send/receive the information it crunches (I would venture to say that 4x AGP is getting old very fast).

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## pYrania

the normal way of submitting binary data are electric pulses. single speed devices use the induction change from a zero (no power) to a one (power) to represent one bit.

quad pumped can make use of every change (0->1 1->0; makes 4 states). the other option would be increasing the bus speed.

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## Forge

All of the AGP types to date are 66MHz 64bit busses. AGP1X is single pumped, 2X is DDR, 4X is QDR. AGP 8X is ODR, I *think*, haven't paid too much attention.

The voltages have changed, too, from 3.3V for 1X/2X, to 1.5V for 4X, to 0.8V for 8X.

As far as AGP speed goes, you'll want to have it more or less in line with how much 3D horsepower you have. A GF2 of any flavor would be fine on AGP 1X, 2X might show a tiny boost, but most likely not. A GF4 really requires 2X and will get a little boost from 4X... A GeForce FX gets cranky on anything less than 4X, but shows only tiny improvements from 8X... Just a rough guide, YMMV.

For Radeons, the ramp is very similar. Just replace GeForce* in the above paragraph with the similar Radeon.. IE: 7500 and below = GF2, 8500 ~= GF3, 9000 = GF4, 9500+ = GFFX.

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## inetman

Hey I get ~4200 with my GeForce3 on my Athlon XP 1700+  :Wink: 

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## Ulukay

/me got about ~8900-9000 fps

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## mpsii

My Athlon XP 1700 with 512MB DDR and a GeForce 3 Ti 200 set to 4x AGP gets ~3700 in glxgears at 1280x1024x16

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## Forge

Hey I get around 20000fps.

Granted, that's at 320x240, but posting fps without desktop res/refresh is worse than useless, it'll lead newbs to despair and defection.

(mpsii - Obviously I'm not referring to you, just the two ahead of you, who didn't read the whole thread.  :Smile:  )

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## Slynix

74208 frames in 5.0 seconds = 14841.600 FPS

1600x1200

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## jaska

Ye that glxgears is no good for benchmarking. Just a general "is your hardware opengl" working test.

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## monicajae

 *Slynix wrote:*   

> 74208 frames in 5.0 seconds = 14841.600 FPS
> 
> 1600x1200

 

um.....HOLY CRAP!!!!!!!!!

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