Lightsmark Frame Rates

Stepan Hrbek is the mastermind behind Lightmark 2007, a program that allows you to benchmark real-time global illumination. Natural lighting makes artificial graphics life-like and real. Computers get faster, but rendering more polygons doesn't add value if lighting still looks faked, so insiders know that the next big thing is proper lighting; aka Realtime Global Illumination.

Typical workloads in real-time rendering will shift, and Lightsmark simulates it. Global Illumination renders often take hours, so is your computer fast enough for real-time?

Before Lightsmark, real-time global illumination was limited to small scenes, small resolutions, small speeds, specially crafted scenes with handmade optimizations. Lightsmark breaks all limits at once, running in reasonably sized scene (220000 triangles) in high resolutions at excellent speed.

Lighting is computed fully automatically in an original unmodified scene from 2007 game World of Padman. This benchmark is not tweaked for Lightsmark, and contains all sorts of geometrical difficulties with extra rooms hidden below the floor.

This scene places medium to low demands on graphics cards and tests the maximum speed with which the scene can be properly displayed at each resolution.

Similar to the low resolution tests, Lightsmark doesn't favor the 8800 GTX. In fact, our GeForce 9800 GTX was outperformed in every single test by the snappy ZOTAC GeForce 8800 GT AMP! Edition video card.

After all of the Lightsmark tests were complete, I wasn't sure what to make of the results. Each test was performed with identical variables on the same day and in the same system. With the only difference being the video card, it's hard for me to understand how the MSI 8800 GTX was outperformed by the lightweight of the bunch. Apparently, G92 is more powerful than the G80 GPU at the low demand level.

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