Looking Back Pt. 3: The 6800 Ultra, ForceWare, and the Future

NV40 vs. R420

Now that we have gone through NVIDIA's efforts on a per-driver level, we finally have a chance to answer the burning question of the moment of where NVIDIA's overall driver-based performance improvement compare to ATI's. As we noted previously, ATI gave us some impressive results with the 6800 series' competitor, the X800 series, and even better numbers on the aging 9700 Pro.

With a brand new architecture, the expectation is that NVIDIA will have more headroom within the NV40 to improve performance, while ATI will have already tapped out much of the R420's headroom since it's a derivative design. NVIDIA also has the reputation of being the more dynamic of the duo with their drivers, so let's see how things go.

As with before, the following is a performance summary, using a performance factor between the first and latest drivers on our selected games to normalize against the innate differences between the X800 Pro and 6800 Ultra. For the NVIDIA drivers, we have started with the 61.76 instead of the 60.72 drivers, since the latter had problems with all of the selected games.

With AA/AF disabled, it doesn't come as a surprise that neither the X800 Pro nor 6800 Ultra post extremely large performance gains except for 3DMark, where we have previously seen ATI optimizing heavily for it. Doom 3 does stand out as the only game that posts even a moderate performance improvement with these advanced features off, favoring the X800 Pro and ATI's traditionally weaker OpenGL performance in this case. Battlefield 2 also shows a minor 10-12% improvement, with a slight edge to the 6800U. Overall then the X800 Pro does a bit better than the 6800 Ultra in total performance improvements, but it's not a very significant difference outside of Doom3.

Looking at the performance difference between the two cards with AA/AF enabled, and the results are surprising to say the least. Once again we see ATI's massive performance improvements for 3DMark05 showing up, once and for all settling the question of who optimized for 3DMark more in this previous generation. Turning to the games, we see ATI further open the gap between itself and NVIDIA in Far Cry, with a 33% to 8% performance improvement on a game that ATI already leads.

Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 basically offset each other, with each side taking a win. As we mentioned previously, Half-Life 2 is a title where ATI has had a natural lead, so to see such an effort by NVIDIA is to be expected, though in terms of raw performance it has been a large gap to close at times. Similarly, ATI benefits the most under Doom 3, adding 28% versus NVIDIA's 18%. Finally, neither side manages to add more than approximately 8% to their Battlefield 2 scores, showcasing just how graphically punishing the game is among everything tested here, but also a bit surprising in that neither side has found a good way to boost their scores yet. BF2 also requires quite a bit of CPU processing power, and the pixel shader effects definitely put a strain on the GPU core - this can be seen by the slightly higher improvements seen under the "basic" settings as opposed to the advanced mode.

Overall then, there is a trend worth noting, however counterintuitive it is. While we have said that it is NVIDIA that traditionally makes the most of its drivers, this was clearly not the case with the previous generation. Whether it's a testament to what the Catalyst team can do versus the ForceWare team, a hardware generational difference, or both, when both the normal and high quality tests are factored in, ATI is the victor for getting the most out of its drivers.