Poor 3DSMax performance with new GTX 470

[loafer87gt]

I installed my GTX 470 last week and am have been blown away with the speed gain over venerable 8800 GTX card. Ever game I throw at it chews through with little effort, and playing games such as BC2 with all the bells and whistles turned on is a joy to behold. Unfortunately, I use my machine for a lot of professional 3d applications, and my new 470 is noticeably slower than my older 8 series card. I looked through the Blender and Autodesk forums, and there are several other users noticing very poor performance on their new 400 series cards, so I did some benchmarks and was shocked at how much slower the new card is compared to Nvidia's past gen cards. One person over at the Nvidia forums said that this is because the current 400 series cards are consumer focussed, and that their new Quadro based cards will address these performance issues through a more optimized set of drivers. As 3DSMax just uses Direct3d, is there any way to "un-break" the drivers to at least get back some of the performance of my older 8 series card? I know Nvidia has always capped the performance of their cosumer level cards in certain pro level apps to give a bit of an advantage to their Quadro series of cards, but with the 400 series they have almost crippled them to the point of being nearly unusable.

Here are some benchies I did comparing the two cards. If anyone knows of any way of addressing these performance issues, please let me know. I am running the DX9 renderer for both tests.

Video Card: eVGA 8800GTX
Display Type: Direct3D
File Name | FPS
=================================================
4viewports.MAX | 82.0345
8direct.MAX | 607.903
8omni.MAX | 581.395
8spot.MAX | 533.333
blitting.MAX | 1049.32
dualplanes.MAX | 953.895
geometry1.MAX | 426.743
geometry2.MAX | 263.158
multitex.MAX | 80.0
rasterize.MAX | 640.205
textured1.MAX | 521.558
textured2.MAX | 176.6
textured3.MAX | 198.807
transpar.MAX | 326.797
wireframe1.MAX | 19.2185
wireframe2.MAX | 15.7505

Comp High: 204.548
Comp Low: 238.807

=================================================
Video Card: GeForce GTX 470
Display Type: Direct3D
File Name | FPS
=================================================
4viewports.MAX | 34.3053
8direct.MAX | 378.072
8omni.MAX | 404.858
8spot.MAX | 386.847
blitting.MAX | 533.523
dualplanes.MAX | 506.436
geometry1.MAX | 283.822
geometry2.MAX | 212.164
multitex.MAX | 0.298215
rasterize.MAX | 345.662
textured1.MAX | 261.051
textured2.MAX | 93.1315
textured3.MAX | 163.079
transpar.MAX | 203.417
wireframe1.MAX | 5.15428
wireframe2.MAX | 5.16245

Comp High: 94.7178
Comp Low: 91.3441

 

[loafer87gt]

Did some benches under OpenGL and I got my wireframe speed back, but the shaded modes are even slower.

=================================================
Video Card: GeForce GTX 470 Quadro 259.12 OpenGL
Display Type:
File Name | FPS
=================================================
4viewports.MAX | 42.1053
8direct.MAX | 191.205
8omni.MAX | 189.753
8spot.MAX | 186.047
blitting.MAX | 170.445
dualplanes.MAX | 581.536
geometry1.MAX | 7.83904
geometry2.MAX | 6.51777
transpar.MAX | 35.2212
wireframe1.MAX | 21.2857
wireframe2.MAX | 19.3711

 

[loafer87gt]

Although there doesn't seem to be a lot of replies to this topic - I did some more tests yesterday and it seems that it is the backface culling that is causing the largest hit on the 400 series of cards. Much more than on my old 8 series card. Once I disabled this feature in 3DSMAX, things are running smoothly again. My frames per second also jumped from 5 in the wireframe benchmarks to 180. A bit of a jump.

Anyways - things are useable once again. Dual planes and blitting speeds are still strangely half the speed, but hopefully some driver fixes down the road will address these slow downs.

J

 

[martinmsj]

Although there doesn't seem to be a lot of replies to this topic - I did some more tests yesterday and it seems that it is the backface culling that is causing the largest hit on the 400 series of cards. Much more than on my old 8 series card. Once I disabled this feature in 3DSMAX, things are running smoothly again. My frames per second also jumped from 5 in the wireframe benchmarks to 180. A bit of a jump.

Anyways - things are useable once again. Dual planes and blitting speeds are still strangely half the speed, but hopefully some driver fixes down the road will address these slow downs.

J

Those driver fixes won't come I think. Because there isn't anything to fix per NVidia as they said these cards are not designed for these professional applications. I wouldn't doubt if they "designed it to not be for professional applications" if someone claimed it.