Today Futuremark Corporation unleashed its highly-anticipated 3DMark03 benchmark for graphics sub-systems of personal computers and our own Ilia Gavrichenkov was able to test his favourite Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz and AMD Athlon XP 3000+ powered systems using this new suite. Needless to say that he liked the new software from Futuremark much and it seems to me that soon this new 3DMark03 will be among our usual tools for measuring the performance of platforms and graphics cards in our labs at X-Bit Labs.

3DMark03 is a collection of 3D tests. These include a set of four game tests that are the only tests used to calculate the overall 3DMark03 score (there is a flight simulator, an FPS, an RPG and “Mother Nature” games). The benchmark also includes a set of CPU, feature, image quality, and sound tests. Each of these tests measures specific 3D-related functionality, but their result is not included in the overall score. They do not fall into the target usage, but are included to allow the user to evaluate these features. The CPU test is a convenient way to measure the performance of the CPU for typical 3D usage. The feature tests isolate the performance of key 3D features primarily relating to shader technologies. The next set of tests is a new addition to 3DMark: the 3D sound tests. These evaluate the impact of 3D sound sources on 3D graphics performance. The software also includes a set of much-improved image quality tools. These provide a powerful way to ensure integrity of the graphics hardware and drivers. What is very good about the 3DMark03 is that it is not really CPU-dependent at the moment. We tried to run the software on Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz and AMD Athlon XP 3000+ powered computers based on E7205 and NVIDIA nForce2 chipsets with ATI RADEON 9700 PRO graphics cards. Apparently, the results were almost equal. The Intel-based PC received 4812 marks, while the AMD powered computer hit 4752 marks. Moreover, Ilia tried processors with different core-clock speeds and got very close results what means that currently the benchmark is more dependant on the performance of the graphics card, rather than on the speed of CPU.

We have also found out that the new 3DMark03 supports 3DNow!, MMX, SSE and SSE2, but not the Hyper-Threading technology from Intel what is quite strange, as the latter plans to implement it in all the Pentium 4 and Prescott chips that come later this year. In addition, our Barton 3000+ chip was recognised as Duron 2167MHz processor.

You can download the 3DMark03 here and here.