Intel Pentium III 866, 850

SPECviewperf

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, commonly known as SPEC, managed to come up with a synthetic benchmark with real world implications. By running specific "viewsets" SPECviewperf can simulate performance under various applications. To be more accurate, according to SPEC, "A viewset is a group of individual runs of SPECviewperf that attempt to characterize the graphics rendering portion of an ISV's application." While this method is by no means capable of identifying the performance of a card in all situations, it does help to indicate the strengths and weaknesses of a particular setup.

SPECviewperf 6.1.1 currently features five viewsets: the Advanced Visualizer, the DesignReview, the Data Explorer, the Lightscape and the ProCDRS-02 viewset. Before each benchmark set we've provided SPEC's own description of that particular viewset so you can better understand what that particular viewset is measuring, performance-wise.

Each viewset is divided into a number of tests, ranging from 4 to 10 in quantity. These tests each stress a different performance element in the particular application that viewset is attempting to simulate. Since all applications focus on some features more than others, each one of these tests is weighted meaning that each test affects the final score differently, some more than others.

All results are reported in frames per second, so the higher the value, the better the performance is. The last result given for each of the viewsets is the WGM or Weighted Geometric Mean. This value is, as the name implies, the Weighted Geometric Mean of all of the test scores. The formula used to calculate the WGM is as follows:

With n being the number of tests in a viewset and w being the weight of each test expressed as a number between 0.0 and 1.0.

If you'd like to know more about why a Weighted Geometric Mean is used, SPEC has an excellent article detailing just why, here.

We ran the SPECviewperf 6.1.1 package under NT for a high-end workstation performance comparison. A noteworthy change has been made since the last Athlon CPU review, we have started using a DDR GeForce in the high-end tests after discovering that in spite of the GeForce's hardware T&L engine the card uses virtually all of the host CPU during the SPECviewperf tests thus putting a great strain on the CPU.

We also received an updated set of drivers (v3.76) for Windows NT that fully take advantage of the KX133 chipset which help to produce some very interesting benchmark results. An interesting thing to note is that because the VIA Apollo Pro 133A (VIA 133A) chipset uses the same AGP core as the KX133 chipset, the 3.76 drivers actually improved performance on the 133A platform as well.