Tom2D Conclusions, Preview Of Part 2
Based on our own hands-on analysis of the current situation, we have to observe that the ATI's Radeon HD 5000-series cards are really struggling with 2D graphics. It’s also somewhat embarrassing that an older on-board graphics chipset is not only faster in a several areas (against both ATI- and Nvidia-based discrete cards), but also that there’s no real workaround for dealing with vector-based programs, either. This is not just a deficiency being measured in our testing; it’s also readily discernable to those who work with 2D graphics on a daily basis. Frankly, it’s quite difficult to imagine how an older Radeon HD 4870 can come so close to matching or beating the newer card in so many tests.
While 2D acceleration (including 2.5D layering) functions well, ATI has not yet managed to implement a number of pure GDI functions in its Radeon HD 5000-series cards. With a number of driver revisions behind us since Windows 7's initial launch, this situation is difficult to comprehend for the folks spending hundreds of dollars on next-gen hardware and running into trouble in 2D apps. We must also point out that this applies not only to our synthetic 2D benchmark, but also to various other real-world programs we used for our testing, including AutoCAD, as well as Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop CS3/CS4, Microsoft Publisher, PowerPoint, and more. This calls for urgent and dramatic improvements, especially because our test results for Vista demonstrate significantly better scores than those in Windows 7 (we'll get into more depth on this in Part 2).
In preparation for and during testing, we participated in several calls with Antal Tungler, technical PR manager at AMD, to discuss the 2D performance of the Radeon HD 5000s under Windows 7. After we proved to ourselves that these performance issues stemmed purely from GDI problems, which nearly every program must handle in creating windows for the desktop, this pronouncement no longer seemed as appropriate, especially for small offices and home users. This is doubly true in light of our discovery that a competitor’s on-board GPU could handle 2D graphics more deftly.
We can only speculate (and hope) that the Catalyst drivers are the where the issue and probable solution lies. If this is true, ATI should be able to remedy things relatively easily. Given that its latest budget and consumer grade graphics cards were recently introduced, general 2D slowdowns across the whole product line seem probable. What troubles us most, given the results of our testing, is that rectangles receive genuine acceleration, while all the other geometric primitives (especially lines and curves) do not. By contrast, an extreme performance fall-off when GPU acceleration is used suggests that nothing good is going on here. Nvidia also falls off when rendering ellipses and polygons, and we’d like to figure out why this is happening as well.
For the time being, we recommend that users deactivate Aero when working with 2D graphics programs if they’re using one of the latest Radeon HD 5000-series cards in their PC. The resulting performance improvement of up to 300% that follows should make up for the lack of eye candy in those windows. That’s why we implore our readers to deactivate Aero for affected programs, so as to avoid turning off Aero altogether on their machines.
How-to: Deactivate Aero for a Specific Program
Right-click the program icon, then select the Properties item from the resulting pop-up menu. Click the Compatibility tab in the properties window, then select the setting checkbox that reads "Disable visual themes" (or similar language).
What’s Next
In Part 2, we’ll test the reflexes and capabilities of our ATI cards thoroughly once again and compare the results with direct and indirect competitors from Nvidia. In the meantime, we’ll also circle back with ATI and Nvidia regarding the results of our initial testing, and wait in rapt suspense for their responses.
After intense conversations with our peers and colleagues (and raging rants on our forums) we want to exercise this benchmark more thoroughly and also put it through its paces on various hardware running XP, Vista, and Windows 7. Our aim is to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the 2D graphics capabilities for all of these systems. We plan to look at older S3 cards, Voodoo, numerous older GeForce-based models, and a full range of ATI cards. In short, we plan to leave nothing out, including even integrated graphics chipsets from our large collection of motherboards.
We already know we will encounter one or more moments of illumination during this process, along with our share of disappointments. A more precise description of the benchmarks, ratings for test results, and a download link for the Tom2D benchmark software will also be included in Part 2, as well. We’re pretty sure that you’ll find all this material pretty interesting, especially as we discover which consumer-grade graphics cards deliver the best 2D graphics performance for specific Windows versions. Let us surprise you: stay tuned!
Update (1/26/2010): With preliminary research into our 2D performance analysis, AMD reports back with the following:
- Tom’s Hardware has tripped over a workload area (2D lines, etc.) that we have not optimized yet.
- Until this new benchmark, we have not seen any other applications that are bottlenecked by this path, and hence have not focused on it until now.
- Our initial analysis has shown that we have no hardware limitations in this area.
- We now have our driver team engaged to optimize this path and will release a new driver to address this workload as soon as possible.
- We have already found an easy way of increasing our performance greatly, and are now going to try and schedule this in a future Catalyst (need to code in production, validate, ensure it doesn’t break anything else, etc.).
"Our initial analysis has shown that we have no hardware limitations in this area." - u might as well fire your analysis team. Seems to me that AMD just wanted to release the new cards as soon as possible. Thank god this issue can be resolved with a new driver.
I have to say well done to Tom's for finding this, and fair play to AMD for their response. I'm reading their response as "you've found an area we need to improve on, we'll improve it as soon as we can make sure the fix works."
Realistically, what more can you expect a company to do? The PC market is so diverse and made up of so many configurations that a GPU maker cannot test EVERYTHING before releasing a product or else nothing would ever get released. If a problem isn't apparent in day-to-day use and requires a benchmark to notice, how are they supposed to find problems unless someone runs the benchmark and tells them?
If the response was "we don't think there's a problem" then it would be different, but they seem to have held their hands up to the problem and are going to fix it ASAP. Nice one.
Yeah, i agree; this "performance" issue isn't really an issue : no crawling, no bottleneck, even though the difference is measurable, it does not affect much day-to-day operations.
So yes, having AMD/ATI stating they will make an effort specifically to please one Tom's benchmark is a good enough result for now, and tells much about Tom's Hardware prescription power.
The next versions of Firefox and IE are slated to utilise Direct2D
A couple of suggestions:
1. Would be great to have Matrox products included here. Remember, they were the king of the hill back in the 2D heydays (with their Millennium line), and lately they are earning a living by focusing on a couple of non-3D niches. Their main focus now is the multi-monitor business, and 2D acceleration can be very important when dealing with lots of screen space (think a desktop of 10240x3200 pixels, would be a huge amount of pixels to be displayed by the CPU w/o help from the graphics adapter).
2. Also sorely missing (not only from this article, but from the whole Internet) is information about the 2D performance of Java (AWT, Swing, SWT) and .Net (WinForms, WPF) applications. Granted, this might be higher level than the graphics adapters and OS layers discussed in the article, but would be very interesting nonetheless.
Fascinating article with some very surprising results. I look forward to seeing how ATI react to this in terms of drivers updates.
Good article, well writen. Credit to AMD for picking it up and credit to AMD for letting us know that thei're picking it up.
When i installed W7 with my HIS 5850, i notice that when i close windows on my desktop, they start to shrink (like they always do when you close windows) but they seemed to stutter for just a blink, then close the rest of the way. I assumed initially that it was just regular OS behaviour but now i'm wondering...
Nice article,
Would be nice to see a comparison with workstation grade cards, makes you wonder if the performance is artificially limited to help sell the Fire GL etc
Nice article,
Would be nice to see a comparison with workstation grade cards, makes you wonder if the performance is artificially limited to help sell the Fire GL etc
Like stil - I'd be interested in Matrox performance in these tests - I'll never forget switching from my Millennium to my TNT, the drop in 2D performance and image quality was palpable.
Additionally I'd like to see a comparison with an OpenGL implementation of the benchmark - to give an idea of what a fully accelerated 2D implementation might be capable of (granted the OpenGL performance would be dependent on drivers too, but I'd wager that, that part of the drivers has had more effort put into it than the GDI side).
Either way it would be good to get an idea of what numbers we should be getting.
Couldn't agree more. The Matrox cards were for a long period THE 2d cards to have (and upgrade with voodoo 3dfx cards for best alround performance). The Parhelia would be nice to see tested also.
Great article, can't wait till the more tests start running in. Will you make a chart, upgrade this article or make new?
Did AMD mention anything about fixing the "Drivers Not Responding" problem or are they just interested in "increasing performance"? My new system with a HD5770 card keeps giving this error when I'm just using 2D applications and it's so bad that it frequently (2/3 times a night) needs a reboot so I can do anything on my computer. The forums are full of people having this problem yet no one seems to be fixing it.
I remember something about NVidia Quadros, and their gaming equivalent, being the same board, because some of the heavy-duty tinkerers changed his Geforce BIOS in order for it to show on the system as a Quadro, and it performed as such in 2D-heavy software, CAD, such as 3DSMax, SpecView perf... I remember clearly the testing benchmark: the guy ran 8-viewports in AutoCAD, without stuttering issues whatsoever.
Well, the names are blurry, but the idea is perfectly clear to this day: these workstation boards were the same running in our gaming rigs back then, and delivered as such, once "renamed" before the system.
Perhaps neat surprises might come from Geforce 2 GTS generation boards onward, regarding 2D performance. Workstation boards (that are all about 2D high-res displaying) would show their muscle in these 2D tests as well.
Didn´t Sisandra or other software run some 2D benchmarks already?
I'm getting some very different result using a Radeon 5850 on a C2D E8400 (both stock) using the 8.70 RC2 drivers that are available on the net on Win 7 x64, Aero enabled:
http://f.imagehost.org/0165/tom2d.png
Notice how the text performance is way above anything in your tests.
It is available but only on the German version of site:
http://www.tomshardware.com/de/wdd [...] 87-14.html
Anyway, the benchmark does not seem to be reliable. I ran it again and got a very big difference in Splines/Bezier - 3385 vs 16987, Arc/Elipse - 2438 vs 8346, Stretching - 563 vs 1796.
Great article! I've been looking for such an article for years!!
The case is that 2D performance is VERY different and my old Matrox card had been the best in 2D for many years (until 2007 when I upgraded and lost AGP port).
Now I think it is very important to attract attention of vendors to 2D performance - because for years all efforts were made for 3D. I remembered how extremely slowly was Microsoft Office in 2006-2007 drawing transparent objects on both NVIDIA and ATI modern cards...
So I do hope that situation with 2D performance will be better in future - partly thanks to this article.
Now I ran this on my ancient Prescott P4 32bit, Radeon X800 with 2Gb of Ram and Windows 7 and got the following. Definately something up with those modern cards and drivers.... Poor show....
Text: 18288 chars/sec
Line: 14264 lines/sec
Polygon: 5647 polygons/sec
Rectangle: 707 rects/sec
Arc/Ellipse: 5186 ellipses/sec
Blitting: 1844 operations/sec
Stretching: 290 operations/sec
Splines/Bézier: 9581 splines/sec
Score: 647
Did I miss something or was there no mention that the ATI cards dramatically reduce core clock speed and memory for 2D applications where the NVIDIA cards keep the clock speed sthe same for 3D and 2D? Wouldn't this make a difference in benchmarks and testing?
well considering at the time of writing this we're almost two years down the line my 2D performance is still as horrendous as day one. thanks for nothing ATI