I spend most of my time writing code, analyzing listings, and running packages like photoshop and corel draw 8. The benchmarks I measured are text box scrolling speeds (160x80 4NT text sessions), Coreldraw redraw time (on a really cool network diagram with tens of thousands of lines), Code listing scrolling speed, and Photoshop redraw times for large 24 bit images, and web page panning speed.
Most of the timing was done with a stopwatch, but I must say the speed difference was so phoenomenal, you didn't need a watch to measure it (which is what really counts).
Both the Matrox and Banshee are pretty fast, with the banshee feeling ALOT faster. The ATI and Permedia were UNUSABLY slow in just about every one of the above applications. Keep in mind that I only run at 1600x1200 (16 and 32 bit, depending on how much speed I need, or if I use photoshop). I run all my applications full screen, so the 2D speed really matters to me.
Just for reference, my Banshee gets 270 lps (lines per sec.) scrolling a 1280x1024 4nt window at 16 bit. My MGA 200 gets 200 lps, and my ATI Rage Pro gets 60. |
