Futuremark 3DMark05, build 110

The new 3DMark is far more demanding than the earlier version and a score of 10,000 points is still unattainable for a single non-overclocked graphics card.

Still, the 6,000 points of the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition are an achievement. Let’s examine the results of 3DMark05 in more detail.

Game Test 1

3DMark05’s first game test represents a battle on the Proxycon space station. We’ve got a typical 3D first-person shooter environment – closed, with many light sources and numerous enemies. The scene also uses complex dynamic shadows.

Although the GeForce 6800 GT can use Shader Model 3.0 to its advantage, the RADEON X800 XT and the X850 Platinum Edition win here. The latter is about 10 percent faster than the former.

The same graphics cards win the test with full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, but the gap between them is negligible this time.

Game Test 2

The second game test shows you a glow-worm in a forest. There’s a lot of vegetation generated dynamically, depending on the camera position. Complex dynamic shadows and lighting effects are also employed here.

ATI’s RADEONs triumph once again in this test, the difference between the two top models amounting to 8-10 percent.

The gap between the RADEON X800/850 and the GeForce 6800 GT is increasing as we turn on full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. Unlike in the first test, the X800 XT and the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition behave differently in the eye candy mode, too. We don’t publish the results of the GeForce 6600 GT because this card has only 128 megabytes of graphics memory on board, and 3DMark05 requires 256MB of memory to work in the eye candy mode in resolutions above 1024x768, at least on the PCI Express platform.