3D Complex test - water surface is banded B&W

[jpcallan]

I have been trying to understand performance descrepancies between two Nvidia Quadro cards, FX 3450 and FX 4600, on two Dell Precision 690s with Xeon E5335 processor. One is running Win7-64 and the other WinXP-32.

I recently bought a cheap Nvidia Quadro FX 3450 for testing to try to reproduce the results on the other 690. After installing it on the WinXP-32 system and the latest Nvida drivers, the 3D Complex test looks weird. The water surface has bands of black and white stripes running left to right that look like a mesh of uncolored tiny polygons.

The Dell Nvidia Quadro FX 3450 is at firmware 5.41.02.54.02.

This same test ran and looked fine on the Quadro FX 4600 card.
This same test ran and looked fine on Win7-64 with the Quadro FX 3450 card and same firmware level.

Any ideas as to what is causing the banding?

[David (PassMark)]

We have actually seen a similar stripping effects on the water. Some narrow white strips that almost look like rolling waves on the water. But it is rare, and it only occurs on a very small number of systems (the cases we have seen we on dual video cards). Our guess was that it was a rounding error in the calculations done on particular video cards or in their device drivers, or some type of tearing effect when different parts of the image were processed on different cards.

It also appears to be only a visual artifact. That doesn't significantly impact on the frames per second.

We'll certainly be having a deeper look at the issue for the next major release.