GL Excess

GL Excess is very good tool for measuring the performance of VGA cards on OpenGL applications and games. This benchmark is consisted of 12 scenes grouped in 4 categories (3 scenes in 1 category). Each category renders different OpenGL techniques. The overall result named XSMark is the sum of the first scene of each category. All scenes were run in the 1024x768 resolution at 32bit.

For comparison reason we tested each card with all 4 categories.

- Category 1

The first category include scenes 1,9 and 12. Nothing specific is stressed on these scenes. Just average use of general OpenGL techniques.

The pic you see is from scene 12 is made of three shifting and rotating layers, which are textured in 4 blending modes. Nice effect!

In this category the ATI cards dominate with the Sapphire 9800 Pro Ultimate first.

- Category 2

The scenes 3,5 and 6 stress the card's 3D particle and polygon processing. Particles are widely used in games and you see them for example when you fire with a laser beam or when you light up a torch.

All 3 scenes are made with a particle system that stresses the card's polygon count and video memory. The spaceship you see in the picture is made of a very large number of polygons.

Sapphire still posing first. Perhaps the R9800 XT finds it difficult when processing too many polygons in textures. Here the GeForce cards show their presence.

- Category 3

The third category sum up scenes 4,10 and 11 that render the blending ability of the card. Blending is the mixture of the graphic layers that result in complicated textures and effects.

The fillrate of each card is also stressed in these scenes. So this test should be a reference of the quality of each card.

Although the Radeon XT has the highest pixel fillrate, it came second behind the Sapphire Pro model.

- Category 4

Scenes 2 and 7 that constitute this category have to do with multitexturing effects. Multitexturing is the process of applying two or more textures to a single polygon or pixel, in order to provide spectacular images.

Scene 8 uses a sphere map that is mixed to a simple texturing technique in order to give reflection effects. Just to know, the reflection and shadow effects you see in games are being accumulated by the stencil buffer

Interesting. GeForce FX chipsets are better that Radeon when simulating shadows and reflections.

- XS Marks

The XS Marks is the score of the GL Excess benchmark. Keep in mind that this score doesn't sum up the results of all 12 scenes. Also it can be posted on the GL Excess website to compare it with other scores.

Definitely Sapphire is the winner of this test. It seems that the R9800 Pro Ultimate model can process OpenGL applications with flying colors! GL Excess marked the end of the synthetic benchmarks.

Next comes the game benchmarking process.