Well, now that we've seen what the new 3DMark consists of, courtesy of our 'Introduction of 3DMark03' article, that details the technology behind the various tests, lets take a look at the performance of the tests under a variety of currently available boards.
Test Setup
The graphics boards used in this test are as follows:
Processor | Board Vendor | Board Variant | Drivers | Review Link |
ATI Radeon 9700 PRO | ATI | Radeon 9700 PRO 128MB | Cat 3.1 (7.83) | Review |
ATI Radeon 9700 | PowerColor | Evil Commando 2 Gold 128MB | Review | |
ATI Radeon 9500 PRO | ATI | Radeon 9500 PRO 128MB | Review | |
ATI Radeon 9500 | Sapphire | ATLANTIS 9000 64MB | Review | |
ATI Radeon 9000 | ATI | Radeon 9000 64MB | Review | |
Matrox Parhelia | Matrox | (Retail) Parhelia 128MB | 1.03.00.043 | Review |
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 | Visiontek | VisionTek XTASY 128MB | 41.09 | Review |
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 | Gainward | Ultra 650TV Golden Sample 64MB | Review |
Although there appears to be an overabundance of ATI parts here, the various 9500 and 9700 parts will be interesting to look at because they are all ostensibly the same chip but with different memory bandwidth and pipeline numbers. By analysing these we can begin to get a better understanding of where some of the bottlenecks may be in each of the tests.
Lets take a quick recap of the specifications of the parts used in these tests.
Processor | Chip | Core Clock Speed | Pixel Fill-rate | Texel Fill-Rate | Memory Bandwidth |
ATI Radeon 9700 PRO | R300 | 325MHz | 2600 pixels/s | 2600 bilinear textures/s | 19.2GB/s |
ATI Radeon 9700 | R300 | 275MHz | 2200 pixels/s | 2200 bilinear textures/s | 17.2GB/s |
ATI Radeon 9500 PRO | R300 | 275MHz | 2200 pixels/s | 2200 bilinear textures/s | 8.6GB/s |
ATI Radeon 9500 | R300 | 275MHz | 1100 pixels/s | 1100 bilinear textures/s | 8.6GB/s |
ATI Radeon 9000 | RV250 | 275MHz | 1100 pixels/s | 1100 bilinear textures/s | 8.8GB/s |
Matrox Parhelia | Parhelia | 220MHz | 880 pixels/s | 3520 bilinear textures/s | 17.6GB/s |
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 | NV25 | 300MHz | 1200 pixels/s | 2400 bilinear textures/s | 10.4GB/s |
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 | NV25 | 270MHz | 1080 pixels/s | 2160 bilinear textures/s | 9.1GB/s |
Note, we are using the default clock speeds that Gainward ship at for their Ti 4200 Golden Sample board, which are a little above those of the standard Ti 4200 configuration.
Here is the configuration of the test PC and 3DMark03 software:
Test System |
|
CPU | Intel Pentium4 3.06GHz |
Motherboard | Intel D845GEBV2 845GE |
RAM | 512MB (1x512MB) PC2700 333DDR RAM |
Network | Integrated |
OS | WindowsXP Professional SP1 |
DirectX Runtime | 9.0 |
Benchmarks |
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3DMark03 |
Benchmark in default configuration except: |
The new default settings for 3DMark03 have a setting of 'Optimal' for the texture filtering which may differ from one board to the next, so this was set to Trilinear filtering to ensure a consistent score throughout. Also the default Anisotropic filtering level is set to 4x which not all cards used in the test are capable of rendering at, so to ensure a fair comparison between all boards, Anisotropic filtering was disabled.