Windows 7: Radeon HD 5000-Series Cards Lack 2D Acceleration
ATI put a ton of effort into developing this latest generation of DirectX 11 hardware; it's only natural that it'd take some time for the software side to mature (and it's hardly a secret that subsequent driver releases improve performance and stability in a number of different ways). We can't exempt Nvidia from this observation either, since we also find a similar problem in its GeForce driver set when using 2D graphics on the company's mobile processors. For this article, we used the most current Catalyst version, 9.12.
Problem 1: ATIKMDAG Stopped Responding, Then Recovered
Anybody who’s experienced this error message probably encountered it after shifting back into 2D mode after exiting a 3D application. We have to believe this very likely results from some kind of driver error.
Let’s recall: without Aero turned on, the DWM is deactivated, so there’s also no more 2D acceleration, either (this applies equally to Windows 7 as it does to Vista). Because we ran into this error repeatedly on test systems with Radeon HD 5750s and Radeon HD 5870 installed (in two different test configurations), we forcibly deactivated Aero across the board. After this evasive maneuver, these errors no longer appeared. Interestingly, the exact same situation (and remedy) also presented itself to us on a notebook PC with GeForce graphics. Whether this is just a massive coincidence or an indication of a conflict among DWM, drivers, and 2D hardware graphics acceleration, only time will tell.
Our next prime suspects include the relatively low default clock speeds for ATI cards running in 2D mode, or perhaps some issue with an early graphics BIOS. Determining whether these two possible culprits are in cahoots or working independently is something we can establish only through long-term observation, or a definite change in behavior thanks to a new driver version.
Problem 2: ATI fails to deliver 2D Hardware Acceleration for GDI, either in whole or in part
We basically stumbled onto this problem due to our difficulties in getting the Radeon HD 5870 to handle 2D graphics. Many might infer from this experience that 3D cards are made for gaming, not for 2D applications. But anybody who’s read through the preceding sections of this article must admit that this has only really become a significant point with the release of Windows 7 (and not Windows Vista). To be more specific, most 3D cards will cut the 2D mustard reasonably well these days. But a direct comparison between the GeForce GTX 285's and Radeon HD 5870's 2D capabilities results in a besting of the ATI card. In fact, even compared to Nvidia's GeForce 7050 (nForce 610i) onboard graphics solution, without its own frame buffer, the newer Radeon places second-best.
Things get even more interesting when the DWM is disabled. Even though no 2D acceleration is possible here, the ATI card jumps into the lead with regard to performance. Compared to Nvidia's GeForce board, running the ATI card with DWM disabled puts it well ahead. Even CorelDraw and AutoCAD run noticeably faster on the Radeon HD 5870 when DWM is turned off. This turns the tables on Nvidia, and contradicts our previous logic and experience benchmarking these GPUs.
For these reasons, we repeated our PassMark tests on these cards.
Unfortunately, none of these tests could pinpoint the issues we were seeing or shed any light on the nitty-gritty details behind the disparate performance numbers. That’s what led us to create our own benchmark, which helped us get closer to the root causes of the issues involved.
"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