Futuremark 3DMark05 build 120

3DMark05 has it in a different way: the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 and the GeForce 6800 GS have roughly the same performance and are both slower than the Radeon X1600 XT which is better suited to execute math1ematics-heavy pixel shaders.

The GeForce 6800 GS and the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 have similar “pure speeds”, but the PowerColor card suddenly sinks to the third place, after the Radeon X1600 XT, as soon as we turn on full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering despite the awful difference in the number of their TMUs (16 against 4). We can’t find a good explanation to that. The memory controller in the R430 chip is less advanced than in the RV530, but more efficient than the memory controller in the NV42 chip. Judging by the results, it is all about the efficiency of pixel processors as they are executing difficult code with complex-texture lookups. The Radeon X1600 XT is hamstringed by its 4 TMUs and the GeForce 6800 GS uses this handicap to the full.