Radeon HD 6450 vs Radeon 9250 - The Compositing Showdown

Posted by Hans de Ruiter

Occasionally I see comments on AmigaOS related forums asking what advantage Radeon HD cards have right now (NOTE: When writing this, 3D drivers were still not available). While this question will soon be irrelevant when the Warp3D drivers arrive, it is a legitimate question. Well, today I was sent a link to a youtube video that gives a pretty clear answer to that question:

Direct link to youtube video. NOTE: It is worth watching this video in HD.

This video comes courtesy of Frank Menzel, one of the talented individuals behind AmiBoing. AmiBoing (or Entwickler-X) have produced a number of games that are well polished audiovisually, and take advantage of AmigaOS 4.1's compositing feature.

This video shows the performance of a parallax scroller on a Radeon 9250, and a Radeon HD 6450 on a Sam440-flex machine. There are multiple parallax layers, and plenty of high resolution bitmaps/textures. It looks like this is the beginnings of a new game... but, I digress.

The results are very conclusive:

** NOTE: The performance increase column measures the change in fps, not the absolute fps difference. For example, The Radeon HD 6450's fps is actually 336% of the Radeon 9250's fps, but the change in fps is 236%.

Clearly, there is no contest; the Radeon HD 6450 leaves the Radeon 9250 in the dust. The Radeon HD 6450 can render the scroller at full HD at smooth framerates whereas, it bumbles along at ~1-3 fps on a Radeon 9250. If this were a game, then it would only be playable in full HD using the 6450.

One thing that I must stress is that both of the test cards are low-end in their respective families. Added to that, the Radeon HD 6450 was further hampered by a PCI-to-PCIe bridge (it was tested on a lowly Sam440-flex, which doesn't have PCI-Express slots). Mid to high-end Radeon HD cards are much more powerful than the 6450, so imagine what these are capable of.

What these results show, is that the Radeon HD cards really are a game changer. The extra performance opens up new possibilities for developers. Plus, the game will change yet again when full OpenGL support unlocks the full potential of their GPUs.

I'm very much looking forward to not only 3D drivers for these cards, but what developers will do with the new possibilities.

Comments (0) | 19 November 2012