X-bit labs

The Mass Market Warrior: ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 Review (page 25)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 09/28/2007 | 10:56 PM ]

Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks

Futuremark 3DMark05

When tested at the default settings the Radeon HD 2600 XT has about as high a result as the Radeon X1950 Pro that has 12 TMUs, 12 ROPs and a 256-bit memory bus. It is also not much worse than the GeForce 8600 GTS – the difference is only 703 points. But what about individual tests which we run with enabled 4x multisampling? Let’s see.

There’s nothing wrong in the failure of the Radeon HD 2600 XT in the first test, which demands a high texturing speed from the graphics card. The new card from AMD isn’t brilliant in the other two tests, though. Its failure in the second test, for which a high fill rate is not at all necessary, is especially surprising. This must be related to the specifics of the transparency antialiasing algorithm employed by AMD cards, which is indicated also by the modest results of the Radeon X1950 Pro.

So, we again see that the overall score issued by 3DMark cannot be viewed as an accurate measure of a graphics card’s performance. This overall score should be considered together with the results of the individual tests that are obtained at different resolutions and/or with enabled full-screen antialiasing.