7900GT Workstation Performance

Although NVIDIA has their Quadro line-up, and ATI has their FireGL series, some users continue to use the GeForce/Radeon products for a workstation environment whether it is due to the system serving two purposes, doing hobbyist 3D renderings, or simply budget concerns. With that said, one of the areas we have yet to touch when it comes to NVIDIA's GeForce 7900 series, and more specifically the 7900GT, is its OpenGL rendering abilities in various workstation applications. For providing these workstation-oriented tests, we used SPECViewPerf v8.1, which was originally developed by IBM and is compatible with numerous operating systems. The application viewsets that are presently used by SPECViewPerf is 3dsmax-03, catia-01, ensight-01, light-07, maya-01, proe-03, sw-01, and ugs-04. All eight of these sets represent relatively high-end applications and should offer a real-world representation of the card's abilities in such an environment. For testing today, we used NVIDIA's private 1.0-8751 Linux display drivers, which are for Beta use only and not available to the general public. NVIDIA's official Linux GeForce 7900 support can be found in these newest drivers and should be available to the public within a few weeks. The primary card used in testing was the EVGA e-GeForce 7900GT CO SUPERCLOCKED 256MB for which we have been using a lot over the past couple of days. This card comes overclocked by default to speeds of 550MHz for the G71 core and 1580MHz memory frequency, compared against the reference 450/1320MHz. As we had done earlier this week with our NVIDIA 1.0-8751 + EVGA 7900GT 256MB review, we ran the card at various GPU/memory frequencies that were controlled from CoolBits. SPECViewPerf was compiled for Linux x86_64 using GCC. Other cards used for comparison purposes today was the eVGA 6800GT 256MB and the Gigabyte 6600GT 128MB. Below is the system configuration used and on the next page are our results.