21 - Synthetic benchmarking: 3DMark 06 & War Front

Synthetic benchmarking: 3DMark 06 Business Edition

Literally millions and millions of benchmark results have been submitted to Futuremarks Online ResultBrowser database. It has become a point of great prestige to be the holder of the highest 3DMark score. A compelling, easy-to-use interface has made 3DMark very popular among game enthusiasts. Futuremarks latest benchmark series, 3DMark03 up-to 3DMark06, continues this tradition by providing a Microsoft DirectX 9 benchmark.

The introduction of DirectX 9 and new hardware shader technologies puts a lot of power in the hands of game developers. Increasingly realistic 3D games will be available over the next year and a half. The use of 3D graphics will become more accessible to other applications areas and even operating systems.

In 3DMark06 we push a score of roughly 12992 points. With a 790i we see a marginal difference from the two core X6800 on the 680i platform. When we switch towards 790i we instantly see a small increase of 200 points. But obviously it's 3dmark06, which loves quad core platforms, and the minute we hit 3.0Ghz on the Q6600 we see magic happen. At 3600 MHz we even get a score of 17695 3DMarks.

Gaming: War Front - Turning Point

For those who just cannot get enough of the Second World War, War Front: Turning Point offers enough spin on the traditional model to offer a very satisfying experience. Graphically, the game is great, and is configured to run on a myriad of systems with different specs. Higher-end PCs will be treated to a nice amount of eye candy, including detailed vehicles, great environments and excellent special and explosion effects.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering

Here is a good example of a CPU sensitive game, and as such the DDR3 memory, Direct GPU-to-GPU communication (PWShort) & Broadcast support kick in really nicely.

Once we start some CPU scaling we again see some impressive stuff, until you run into GPU limitation though.