Why is everybody comparing Fire gl8800 to XGL family (because of the price?) Fire Gl44 is much better card the 8800 - regardles of spec viewpref
here are comperasments of 900XGL and Fire Gl4
900XGL and 750XGL take a huge performance dump on high density scenes
Compared to Fire Gl4 (card of my choice) using maya-test.ma from http://www.maya-testcenter.de/.
On the original test scene results are as follows:
900XGL:
44 f/s wireframe
21 f/s shaded
15 f/s textured
7 f/s text&light
7 f/s light
Fire Gl4:
38 f/s wireframe
19 f/s shaded
12.5 f/s textured
12 f/s text&light
19 f/s light
(both cards tested on the same type of box - Dual Xeons 2.0GHz 2GB RDRAM SCSI RAID L 0 straped U 160 drives, Dual Monitors running 1280X1024 at 75Hz)
The systems reflected a real prod environment setup (no bench mark tweaking)
As you can see, 900XGL didn't handle lights too well (the card also had hardware overlay planes disabled. When I enabled the planes performance drop was about 35+% - 44 f/s to 29 f/s in wire frame mode).
Fire Gl4 had hardware overlay planes enabled with 8-bit double buffering mode.
A real surprise came when I made scene heavier by instancing all the "flowers" X4 (now scene was 4 times heavier).
Here are the results:
900XGL:
13.8 f/s wireframe
5.7 f/s shaded
3.4 f/s textured
1.8 f/s text&light
1.8 f/s light
Fire Gl4:
17.1 f/s wireframe
6.2 f/s shaded
3.4 f/s textured
3.4 f/s text&light
6.2 f/s light
WOW!
I noticed that Fire gl handles the lights in Maya even better the Wildcat III (in all other aspects wildcat beats Fire Gl4 - well dirextX and Direct 3D support is much better in Fire Gl4)
In conclusion
Looks like XGL series are not yet geered for heavy scenes of the production environment, but it's price is nice - performance - so so