Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/2991
So although I started this blog to add more of a personal touch, it has turned into a GPU-blog as of late :) I don't mind, so if you don't mind, let's get to it:
As you've probably already seen, Part 2 is up as well as our Catalyst 3.8 investigation. One of the biggest complaints I saw was why we didn't report raw frame rate numbers for Tomb Raider; we didn't provide those numbers simply because we thought the percentage drops in performance were much more useful. Because of the granularity of TRAOD's settings we were able to give you an idea of exactly how much of a performance hit you get when enabling PS2.0, which supported the theory that ATI's hardware seems to be running PS2.0 code that isn't specifically NV-optimized much faster than NVIDIA. For those of you that have asked for the numbers, we threw them in the Catalyst 3.8 article. There was no malicious intent behind not including the regular fps numbers, we just wanted to cut down on some of the graphs - but ask and ye shall receive, so ye did in the latest article.
It looks like the new Halo 1.02 patch improves the real-world application of the timedemo numbers, so we will be switching over to that version for Part 3 of the article. Apparently the new patch removes a memory check that was called during every frame; this memory check was a debugging feature needed during development but is unnecessary and should artificially deflate Halo scores. The new patch fixes the problem and as I mentioned, we will switch over to the new patch asap.
Derek should be taking a much needed nap right now and I'll most likely work on bringing you some more CPU information over the next two weeks. We haven't set a firm publication date for Part 3 of our Fall graphics roundup yet but I'm hoping to get the wheels in motion towards the end of this week/weekend at the earliest.
Tis all for now, take care guys 'n gals.