RagTroll

This test is new to 3DMark03. It shows how well the system can distribute the workload between the CPU and graphics card Let’s check the results now.

And once again, ATI wins the test. RADEON 9700 PRO and 9500 PRO outperform GeForceFX 5800 Ultra, while 64MB RADEON 9500 kills GeForce4 Titanium GPUs. Xabre 600 is again in the end. This is quite an expected picture considering the complexity of the scene and the fact that this graphics solution emulates vertex shaders on the software level.

Conclusion

So, we have tested thirteen graphics cards ranging from the value GeForce3 Ti200 and RADEON 9100 to the latest newcomer GeForceFX 5800 Ultra. Of course, we can’t make any far-reaching statements basing on results of one benchmarking package, but anyway there are some things to be mentioned.

First of all, we should congratulate NVIDIA and the company’s software developers. Their 42.68 drivers helped GeForceFX 5800 Ultra based card to outrun its main rival, RADEON 9700 PRO nearly in all the tests and resolutions. We won’t say anything about the price-to-performance ratio of the two leaders in the current graphics card market, as the price of GeForceFX 5800 Ultra has not yet been finalized. You can only be sure that it’s going to be VERY expensive.

We would also like to single out RADEON 9500 PRO based card. It showed really worthy performance in all gaming and theoretical tests following the two leaders: RADEON 9700 PRO and GeForceFX 5800 Ultra. The two RADEON 9500 based cards showed that the amount of graphics memory as well as the width of the graphics memory bus doesn’t always affect the performance much. These two behave much alike in some tests.

Graphics cards based on GeForce4 Titanium chips are not to be dismissed as obsolete yet. They are quite powerful gaming chips, unfortunately without ver.1.4 pixel shaders and ver.2.0 vertex shaders support. That’s why graphics cards based on GeForce4 Ti4200-8x, Ti4600 and Ti4800 GPUs perform well in the first gaming test, “Wings of Fury”, which doesn’t use pixel shaders, and in some theoretical tests. But when it comes to complex Game 2 and 3 tests, they lose to RADEON 9500 / 9500 PRO / 9700 PRO based cards. There is nothing to be done about it, unfortunately.

Xabre 600 is quite a different story. The main advantage of this graphics card is that it rose to the occasion and managed to run 3DMark03 tests. We can’t take seriously the results of the CPU tests where Xabre 600 outruns both: RADEON 9700 and GeForceFX 5800 Ultra. This is no more than an error (or peculiarity?) of the benchmarking software. With all its artifacts, like displaying just one half of the screen, Xabre 600 shouldn’t be allowed to run 3DMark03 at all.

As for the remaining cards, like GeForce4 MX440-8x, GeForce3 Ti200, RADEON 9100 and 9000, there is only one test in 3DMark03 for them: “Game 1 – Wings of Fury”. In complex tests, like Game 2 and 3, they show too low performance. It’s not correct to compare them to other, more advanced graphics cards. Futuremark Company claims even that Game 1 is the only test intended for cards like that.

Summing all up, we should say that the 3DMark benchmarking set is too “new” and too “heavy” for most graphics cards now available. Still, as our experiments showed, it can be used to compare performances of modern DirectX9 graphics chips. We guess this benchmarking tool is going to become a standard de facto in graphics cards benchmarking, like 3DMark2001 SE has been hitherto.