Performance - 3DMark 03

3DMark 03
The latest in the 3DMark benchmark series built by Futuremark® Corporation (formerly known as MadOnion.com). The name 3DMark has become a standard in 3D graphics benchmarking; it has grown to be used by virtually all on-line and paper publications. It has proven itself as an impartial and highly accurate tool for benchmarking 3D graphics performance of the latest PC hardware. 3DMark has a very large following worldwide among individual PC owners. 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 state-of-the-art Microsoft DirectX 9 benchmark.

The introduction of DirectX 9 and new hardware shader technologies put 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 dependable tool for benchmarking 3D graphics.

As you can see not very much to show off here. This benchmark is so young that we hardly had time to test anything with it. I must again state that I cannot complete find myself in terms with the way how FutureMark is compiling the end-result score. As you can see GFFX does a pretty perky job but .. NVIDIA told us to that have optimized this driver in order to show you how easy it is to get a nice score. Here's what they had to say about Detonator driver 42.68:

We did that driver to show how easy it is to optimise for the benchmark and how the scores should not be taken at face value - I know the good sites, including yourself, understand the balance needed between synthetic and real world benchmarks, but a lot of sites take that benchmark to be the final word on GPU performance and our point is that it should only, if at all, be used as a background test and not a measure of actual game performance or for that matter DX9, given it's shortcomings in using true DX9 shaders.

It's of course true, 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. On the other side .. I did not hear NVIDIA complain about 3D Mark 2001 SE in the past either. Okay, enough of that.