How much does enabling the pipes help a 6800nu?

[jhatfie]

Well I was curious what the 4 extra pipes and extra vertex shader mean to performance on my 6800nu, so I took my Chaintech AA6800 OC'd to my everyday settings of 430/920 paired with my A64 3200+ at 2.55ghz and did a couple benchmarks with it running the standard 12p/5vp and rivatuner enabled 16p/6vp. FarCry Bench was the training level timedemo @ 1280x1024 with Ultra detail and 2xAA/4xAF, average of three runs. Doom3 was just the demo1 timedemo at 1280x1024 with high detail with 2xAA/8xAF, 2nd run. I also dropped my card down to standard 6800nu speeds (325/700) to see how big a difference it all makes with overclocking compared to leaving it alone.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,12/5,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,16/6,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,12/5:6800nu clocks
3dMark03:,,,,,,,,,10676,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,12549,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 9164
FarCry:,,,,,,,,,,,,, 38.27fps,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,46.75fps,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,31.79fps
Doom3:,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 70.1fps,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 79.6fps,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, 58.7fps

So there you go in case you were wondering as well. As you can see I got a overall 37% increase over vanilla 6800nu speeds in 3dMark03, 47% increase in FarCry and 35% in Doom3. Clock for clock and just adding the extra pipes and vp, the increases were 17.5%, 22% and 13.5% respectively.

 

[Alyosha]

Thanks dude, good benches. I've got my extra pipes enabled and can feel the performance difference when I play but haven't tried to quantify it yet. Its good to see some numbers on now.

 

[jhatfie]

Only thing I wish was that I had a 6800GT around to test so I could see how much performance is lost by not having the other 128MB of faster ram.

 

[CleanSlate]

Someone else enabled and they got around 1500 extra points in 3dmark03. Not a bad bump in performance.

~Adam

 

[Xilikon]

Only thing I wish was that I had a 6800GT around to test so I could see how much performance is lost by not having the other 128MB of faster ram.

I'm also interested to know this... I'm still pondering the need of a 6800GT or if 6800NU suffice for my needs (some tweaking and unlocking can get nice results as this topic showed).