I think I grossly overestimated the performance of this VIA EPIA-SP8000E mainboard. It gets a 3DMark03 score of 37. Yes, a whole 37.
For comparison, a half-way decent score for a modern PC is at least 10000. Yes, all those zeros.
This is going to be an interesting demo…
Marker: “So, does it run Halo?”.
Me: “Ahahahahahahahahahahahahaa!!!! Man, you guys are great!”.
Not going to be fun.
It doesn’t appear to have any hardware pixel shading, although I think it does manage hardware vertex shading… it does really well on certain tests which seem to be only about texturing, like bump-map tests. It has a fill rate in the vicinity of 220 Mtexels/s (multi-textured), which isn’t actually that bad. I thought it would have been fill-rate limited, not vertex limited. It manages a pathetic 1.4 Mtriangles/s with a high polygon count and just 1 light, which halves with 8 lights. No hardware T&L, either. But ironically it performs better (at least, by my visual judgement) at 1024×768 than 640×480… very bizarre.
For comparison, the PS2 can theoretically managed 1200 Mtexels/s (no idea if that’s multi-textured or not), and 75 Mtriangle/s. Shit.
It seems to really die horribly once exposed to a scene of any real complexity – the plane raid benchmark in 3DMark01 runs really nicely, until you get more than two or three planes on screen at once…
So, apparently no Halo for me. :(
