Page 18 - 3DMark 03 & 05

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. Above you can see the results for 3DMark 03 with the G70 being compared to all other major cards and yes 6800 GT in SLI still hauls ass.

Now when we overclock a little we immediately see the score rise towards 17500. But look at the fantastic performance with various AA and AF settings. It's really impressive what numbers the card can crunch with quality settings.

Time to have a look at 3DMark 05.

Default is the again standard 1024x768 reference test run from FutureMark with all options set to default, very respectable performance. 3Dmark is designed in a way the exclude the CPU in the score calculation.

You can obviously see that only SLI cards can match the G70 performance. Future driver updates will make the score go a little higher in the future I guess. This always has been a developing trend with the newer cards. Let's overclock once again and also have a look at the AA and AF results:

There we go, we forced the quality settings at driver properties, 3DMark does only support the AA modes which are found through DX. Any special-case AA like 8x(s) AA modes have to be forced on from the drivers control panel. The 8x(s)AA results seem to be on the high side, might be a driver bug as we where still using a beta driver set here. BTW have a look at that 8471 score once we overclock the card.

Imagine what two of these babies would do in SLI mode...