2D, Acceleration, And Windows: Aren't All Graphics Cards Equal?
Table of contents
- 1. Part 1: Laying A Theoretical Background
- 2. Windows: Mouse As Window-Washer?
- 3. The Limits Of 2D: One Space With Many Windows
- 4. 2.5D: The Myth Of 2D Hardware Acceleration
- 5. Windows XP: Old School 2D And The Limits of WM_PAINT
- 6. Windows Vista: Real Progress And The Art of Omission
- 7. Windows 7: Return Of The Prodigal Son
- 8. Windows 7: Radeon HD 5000-Series Cards Lack 2D Acceleration
- 9. Tom2D Benchmark: Radeon HD 5870 Vs. GeForce GTX 285 In Windows 7
- 10. Tom2D Benchmark Results, Continued
- 11. Tom2D Conclusions, Preview Of Part 2
Update (1/26/2010): Since the original publication of this story on Tom's Hardware DE, we've shared our findings and benchmark binary with AMD for analysis. The company's commentary is included in our conclusion.
Intro: Aren't All Graphics Cards Equal When It Come To 2D?
Since the launch of Windows 7 a few months ago, graphics card vendors have introduced a handful of new GPUs, working to develop and roll out drivers for their products. Enough time has also passed for them to clean up the teething pains of a fresh operating system (which have been, thankfully, significantly less painful than what we saw during the move to Vista), enabling objective benchmarks on a clean slate of new technology.
We also realized that, while 3D takes center stage nowadays, there might also be some benefits for us to revisit a component of graphics that we take for granted every day without really thinking too much about it—namely, 2D. This wasn't one of those out-of-the-blue "let's add something to the test suite that hasn't been a real issue since the days when RAMDAC performance was a major differentiator" moments. More on this shortly.
Although the primary area of interest for most users is on the display speed of the Windows GUI (where Windows 7 earns lots of praise in comparison to Vista), we determined somewhat reluctantly that the supposed “graphics refresh” in Windows 7 isn’t really too fresh at all. Compared to Windows XP (and even Vista), graphics card vendors don't seem to have fully optimized for 2D graphics in Windows 7 quite yet, at least when it comes to close examination of the brand new implementation of GDI (Graphics Device Interface) API calls. What we know as 2D graphics consist of more than cool colors, object blending effects, and animated menus with drop shadows; they also require developers to get down and dirty with pixels, lines, curves, rectangles, polygons, and all kinds of other “graphics primitives,” as they’re sometimes called.
Important Preliminary Note
We wanted to stay away from emotional overtones in this article, even though devoted occupants of the red or green camps might need to rub their eyes as they read through this material. Because we ourselves didn’t want to believe the results of our own tests, we took extra time and care in this story’s preparation, in the interests of all affected parties, to produce results that are as objective and defensible as possible. We also worked hard to create the most objective possible bases for comparing graphics cards against one another. We will also avoid pointing fingers: rather, it’s important to understand this article as a contribution and an aid to those users who not only use their PCs for gaming, but also for those who use their PCs to get real work done.
In this context, it’s important to observe that, currently, it can be quite vexing to work productively with 2D graphics in Windows 7. For example, using a Radeon HD 5870 and the latest drivers, we found it difficult to produce simple vector-based graphics, to render simple or complex CAD designs, or even to play 2D games in higher graphics quality modes. We mention this not as a criticism, but instead as an approach to a definite problem that we sought to analyze and understand as fully as possible.
Theory and Practice
Because most readers are likely unaware of the built-in functions and behavior of 2D acceleration in Windows XP through Windows 7, we’ve broken this extremely comprehensive article into two parts. In this first part, we will convey the noteworthy background and technical topics relevant to 2D graphics, so that when readers graduate to the second part, they’ll not only be able to understand our tests, but also be better-equipped to interpret our results. To help this process along, we even developed our own small benchmarking program (and will make it available for interested parties to download and use for themselves). Our goal is to make both parts as informative, readable, and noteworthy as possible.
In the next section, we’ll tackle 2D basics. In passing, we’d also like to observe that a little background in this area won’t hurt anybody, and may even come in handy for other things besides understanding our benchmarks.
"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