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3DMark 03 Professional
3DMark 05 Business Edition
The latest in the 3DMark benchmark series built by Futuremark Corporation (formerly known as MadOnion.com). More than 5 million 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, 3DMark03, 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 this new environment, 3DMark03 will serve as a tool for benchmarking 3D graphics.

This benchmark is not based on any game. Please remember this, never buy a graphics card based solely on the 3DMark score. I'm not bashing the 3D Mark suite here, it's good software but definitely not the sole basis for you to make an informed decision on to buy a graphics card. Especially after what happened in 2003.

Let's have a look at 3DMark 03 and 05 scores. I have to admit, the importance of these results can be discussed in many way and varieties, yet according to one of our polls what you want to see are the scores and the scores are simply fantastic.

You'll laugh your ass off once you finished the first run with 3DMark03 and actually see a 26000+ score.

Half-Life 2

The moment the entire graphics industry was waiting for is here, after a delay or 200 one of the biggest titles in the history of PC games was released by Valve, Half-Life 2. Gameplay that should be extraordinary, sound that'll make you drool and a first time graphics experience that'll make the choice between doing the "thing" or playing this game a difficult one.

Gordon Freeman is back! Along with scientist Eli Vance and his daughter Alyx, your mission is to save the planet from total alien supremacy. See, that petite incident in Black Mesa was just the beginning: now those pesky Xen invaders and a new threat called the Combine have spread across the whole Earth, causing massive amounts of death and destruction. Its up to you to set things right.

The source engine provides a gritty realism that surpasses (marginally) even Doom 3s "Super-real" prowess. While maybe not as visually spectacular as Doom 3, HL2s lighting seems a lot more "natural". Let me put it like this, Doom 3s lighting can seem like someone has inserted a laser light show onto Mars making it almost too spectacular, where as HL2s lighting is just "accepted" by the eye as lights reflect, and create shadows with precision, streaming through windows with an unnerving realism.

For HL2 we recorded our own timedemo. We opted for the riverboat level where complex shaders will make things rough on the graphics card.

Of course the AMD 64 4000+ system that we are using today is not exactly the slowest system on the globe but at 10x7 we clearly see CPU limitation. Although the 7800 GTX is close to the Radeon x850 XT PE I must say that this is a very good result. Half-life 2 always has been in favor of Radeon cards bigtime.

Now, I say this because I want you to see what happens when we enable 4xAA and 8x AF see below.

At 10x7 we see 97 frames per second on average for the G70 in SLI which is lower then one G70. This is due to CPU limitation. Your processor needs to feed two GPU's with data, which is slightly more demanding. As soon the CPU bottleneck becomes less of a diference things correct themselves. HL2 remains heavily CPU boittlenecked though and the scores represent that. Even with 4x antialiasing and 8x Anisotropic filtering.

4xAA, 8xAF, 1600x1200 at 96 FPS. Meeeh, that's nothing to complain about I guess :)

For those interested, you can read our own full HL2 review right here. Our cheapest on-line price for Half-Life 2 is