ELSA GLoria II Quadro SDR

SPEC’s ViewPerf - ProDesigner Viewset (ProCDRS-02)

The SPEC organization viewset, ProCDRS-02, is a replacement for the much used CDRS viewset.  It is intended to model the graphics performance of PTC's Pro/Designer software.  Unlike the CDRS, the ProCDRS-02 data set is large (a trunk); for the shaded model 281,000 vertices and 131,000 triangles and for the wireframe 202,000 vertices and 184,000 lines. 

There are 10 tests in this test suite; the first 2 tests are AA wireframe and the other 8 are shaded/rendered tests.  

Tests 1 & 2 - AA Wireframe
Tests 3 & 4 - Shaded
Tests 5 & 6 - Shaded with texture
Tests 7 & 8 - Shaded with texture & dynamic reflections
Tests 9 & 10 - Shaded with color per vertex

<>The tests were ran at 1280x1024 truecolor with Vsync off. The Pro/E profile was selected for the ELSA driver and the 3Dlabs drivers; the NVIDIA 3.65 driver did not have any such tuning options.

The test suite measures the frame rate in fps for each of the tests.  Also measured in this suite is the display list build time (DLB) for each of the sub tests, but this was not a significant factor for any of the tested cards.

One could reasonably argue that the weight factors for this test are too heavily biased toward sub tests 1 and 2, which are AA wireframe views. Thus, in addition to the composite score, the sum of the test 3 and 4 results for each card tested is presented.  Tests 3 and 4 are relevant for most MCAD users who like to work with shaded views.

The GLoria II Quadro with the ELSA driver was the clear winner in this test.  The GLoria II - NVIDIA 3.65 driver combination was about 20%-25% slower than the ELSA driver on some of the key subtests. The GLoria II was considerably faster then the other cards tested. On the important Test 3+4 metric, the GLoria II was 50% faster than the next fastest card (GVX1 AGP).

The CL Annihilator (GeForce) SDR – NVIDIA 3.65 driver combo hung and then crashed on the first sub test (AA line) with a blue screen.  As a side note, on another system (Athlon 650, Gigabyte MB, Guillemot GeForce card) and what appeared to be a 3.59 driver, ProCDRS-02 ran but was very slow on the first two sub tests. 

The highest performing NT systems reported at the SPEC site score about 50% better on the composite and the Test 3+Test 4 metric than the GLoria II but they used Intel 700/733 Coppermine processors and were expensive systems.