Written By : Jeff Nettleton and Trevor Haag
September 2004

Pixel Shader Test
This is taken from the Canyon Flight; the rock face is separated from the test and used in this feature test. There's no reflective water only the rock face.

Vertex Shader Tests
This consists of 2 tests, a simple and complex test.

Vertex Shader - Simple
This test does simple transformation and single light lighting on six high polygon sea monster models.
Each sea monster has over one million vertices to transform and illuminate, so the total workload is quite substantial.
The vertex shader used here could quite well fit into a shader model 1 vertex shader, but since 3DMark05 concentrates on SM2 and offers different SM2 (and 3) profiles to choose from, the shader is declared in HLSL and SM2 as all shaders in the game tests.

Vertex Shader - Complex
This illuminates, and most importantly, transforms a large number of grass straws.
Each straw is skinned and bent separately, more towards the tip of the straw, like real grass straws waving in the wind.
The straws are waved according to a fractal noise calculated on the CPU, but it is highly optimized to decrease the influence of the CPU performance on the measurement.
The grass is kept at a distance from the camera, offering a less interesting visual effect, but this is necessary to decrease the influence of fill rate to the measurement.

Batch Size Tests:

This basically tests the number of triangles per second per batch.
These batches range from 8 to 32768 triangles.