Linux Pentium III Chipset Comparison

3D AGP Performance: SPECviewperf 6.1.2

SPECviewperf is a large and varied OpenGL benchmark suite. These benchmarks are each supposed to represent a different aspect of research in industry or academia. To be fair, we will test all six benchmarks included with SPECviewperf 6.1.2.

While the Intel chipsets (815 and BX) trade off the lead, the VIA Apollo Pro 133A cleanly loses this round by as much 21%. Again, the VIA is running with the least impressive AGP transfer mode (2X, 66MHz) of the three, but given the closeness of the other tests, we must conclude that this points to a general design shortcoming in comparison to the two Intel chipsets. As the raw AGP benchmarks above all came out fairly uniform, we would assume that this points to a possible issue with memory performance. SPECviewperf is a large and detailed benchmark that stresses the performance of the memory bus as well as the AGP bus. Given the large ammount of data being pushed to complete these tests, it appears that the VIA is caving under increased load.