The feature tests

Besides the new game and CPU tests, FutureMark has also reworked their feature tests, which test specific aspects of the GPU such as fill rate and shader performance. The feature tests do not affect the overall 3DMark score.

The following descriptions of the feature tests come from FutureMark’s reviewer’s guide for 3DMark Vantage:

Feature Test 1: Texture Fill

This test draws frames by filling the screen rectangle with values read from a tiny texture using multiple texture coordinates. The texture coordinates are rotated and scaled between each frame.

Feature Test 2: Color Fill

This test draws frames by drawing a rectangle across the screen multiple times. The color and alpha channels of each corner of the rectangle is animated. The pixel shader is pass-through. The interpolated color is written directly to the render target using alpha blending. The render target is in 16-bit floating-point format, currently the most relevant format for HDR rendering output.

Feature Test 3: Parallax Occlusion Mapping (Complex Pixel Shader)

This test draws frames by rendering a single rectangle (two triangles) on screen, seen from an animated camera position. The pixel shader uses the Parallax Occlusion Mapping technique to simulate complex geometry under the surface of the rectangle. Heavy ray-tracing operations against a huge depth-map determine the actual intersection of the view ray with the geometry. Further ray-tracing determines visibility of that point from multiple animated light sources. Finally, the surface is shaded using the relatively complex Strauss shading model.

This test represents a very complex, heavy pixel shader, containing massive amounts of texture reads (ray-tracing) and dynamic flow-control (ray-tracing, looping over multiple lights), as well as traditional lighting calculations (Strauss). All the geometry on screen is rendered on just two triangles, and simulated entirely in the pixel shader.

Feature Test 4: GPU Cloth

This test features physical simulation of cloth on the GPU. The simulation is performed as a vertex simulation using a combination of vertex shader and geometry shader stages, with several simulation passes needed for each simulation step. Stream out is used to cycle the cloth vertices from one simulation pass to the next. This test stresses the vertex shading, geometry shading and stream out features of the hardware.

Feature Test 5: GPU Particles

This test features physically simulated particle effects on the GPU. The simulation is performed as a vertex simulation, with each vertex representing a single particle. Stream out is used to cycle the particle vertices from one simulation pass to the next.

There are hundreds of thousands of particles in the test, all individually simulated, and colliding with a height map. The particles are rendered by expanding each vertex to a full rectangle in the geometry shader. The test stresses the vertex shading, stream out.

Feature Test 6: Perlin Noise (Math-heavy pixel shader)

This test features multiple octaves of Perlin noise evaluated in the pixel shader. Each color channel has its own noise function for added computational load. The Perlin noise function is a standard building block of procedural texturing approaches, and is very math-intensive to compute in a pixel-shader. This feature test emphasizes the arithmetic computing power of the graphics hardware.