Futuremark 3DMark06 build 1.0.2

The difference is less obvious in 3DMark06. The ATI Radeon X1950 Pro scores 491 points more. The overall scores of the cards are lower here than in 3DMark05.

The Radeon X1950 Pro enjoys a much higher advantage over the GeForce 7900 GS in the SM3.0/HDR than in the SM2.0 tests because the former group of tests requires processing very complex pixel shaders and working with FP16 HDR. Moreover, with its only 12 TMUs and 12 ROPs, the Radeon X1950 Pro easily competes with the more expensive GeForce 7900 GT in the first group of tests and leaves the Nvidia solution behind in the second group of tests.

So, while the GeForce 7900 GS is just a little slower than the Radeon X1900 GT and the Radeon X1950 Pro in the first test, it looks humble in the second, which is a modernized version of the second game test from 3DMark05. Note that the results of the GeForce 7900 GS and the 7900 GT are very close in the last case, so the disabled pixel and vertex processors of the latter card have nothing to do with it. Perhaps the ROPs are the bottleneck, but we don’t see that in the first SM2.0 test which contains a larger scene and thus puts a higher load on the raster operators.