There is a bit of a controversy going on in the newsgroups lately about the performance issues of the 3D Prophet. Next to this something else happened, today I spoke with my contact at Guillemot NL, they reported to me that in the February Issue of PCM (A Dutch magazine) a Asus V6600 outclasses the 3D Prophet in the very popular benchmark 3DMark 2000.

Both cards have the same specs, they are based up-on SDR RAM. The 3D Prophet is equipped with 5ns RAM, the V6600 with 5.5ns RAM. Therefore you can safely assume that the 3D Prophet should be a tiny bit faster in higher resolutions, furthermore both cards should, performance wise, be level compared to each other.

To prove that even quality magazines like PCM can forget certain posibilities I will try to show what they had forgotten to look in to.

Some of you might know recently NVidia updated their drivers from 3.5x towards 3.6x What has happend in that fase is this, in the 3.53 drivers  dynamic lighting was broken( disabled as NVidia calls it). Thus the GPU had lesser tasks to calculate. NVidia fixed dynamic lighting in the 3.6x drivers, there was a corresponding performance drop. 

PCM simply used the older 3.49 drivers for the ASUS V6600, while using 3.62 Detonator drivers for their 3D Prophet review, so you can see, there is a difference of 11 builds between the drivers. Something they should have looked into.

The lesson that can be learned here is, if you are about to benchmark a serie of cards then you should make sure that the drivers you install are up-to-date. The entire PCM article can be thrown in a recycle bin as far as I'm concerned, unusually unprofessional since the outcome can't be taken serious this way.

If drivers differ this much then they should have done a comparison with standard NVidia reference drivers from the same build.

To prove my theory I have tested and benchmarked both cards with v3.62 drivers from ASUS and v3.62 from Guillemot, and here are the results:

So people, there you have it. Both cards are virtually identical, the compared results are almost nihil, the 3D Prophet is in fact a teeny weenie faster in High Resolutions with 32Bit, and of course this is due to the fact that it is equipped with the faster 5ns memory modules. 

- Hilbert Hagedoorn

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