PC : Sharok : AMD XP 3000+ (2,3 Ghz)

3DMark 2005 score : 2474

Performance summary : Slideshow territory

Usually, 3DMark gets your spirits down every time they get a new bench out. This time is no exception. Here I am without having had enough time to get my rig up to 6000 with 3DMark 2003, and Futuremark delivers a brand-spanking new 2005 release that throws me back into the gutter.

A review of various cards on a high-end Pentium system can be found at the Tech Report, but lets review my scores first :

CPU Tests	fps	Catalyst 4.9	Catalyst 4.11
Return to Proxycon	1.4	1.5	1.4
Canyon Flight	2.6	3	2.9
Final Score	2902	3154	3155

As you can see, I have benchmarked this machine repeatedly with the different Catalyst versions. Overall, my global score hangs around 2460 points, give or take a few. Now that I have splurged on the Pro version of this benchmark, I can give the details and the graphs :

Other Values	Catalyst 4.11
Fill Rate - Single-Texturing	1942,2 MTexels/s
Fill Rate - Multi-Texturing	2997,2 MTexels/s
Pixel Shader	48.4 fps
Vertex Shader - Simple	45,3 MVertices/s
Vertex Shader - Complex	26,6 MVertices/s

This is all a bunch of nice numbers, but what really interests me is the performance given by the graphs. For Proxycon, here is the result :

As you can see, the minimum framerate is a dismal 5,52 fps. Dreadful. But with Firefly it gets worse :

Not only does the performance minimum drop by another 0,34 frames, but the average also drops by a significant 55% (4,04 frames). Sigh. Oh well, there's still Canyon :

Here the performance minimum has a weak increase, but the average climbs up by a respectable 6,3 frames. Still slow, but it climbs.

So here I am now at 2466 points. Its a nice increase from 2450 for a driver upgrade, but it still means a large drop from my already feeble 3DMark2003 score of  5517. And to think I used to get 112 fps in Nature. Its going to cost a lot of money to get that in Firefly, I can tell !

Anyway, let me comment on the bench itself. First of all, with a best average framerate of 13,62 images per second, I can say that the word "slideshow" is best applied here. My Radeon 9800 is now so out of date it can't even run the Canyon Flight test in a reasonable manner. Nonetheless, throughout the tests I remarked (or I thought I did) that the image quality in itself is not so bad. It is curious to note that the CPU gets a better score than the whole system, even though its rendering speed is not only dismal, but its quality is too.

But Futuremark does not give the CPU score as the final benchmark score.

Now, lets look at the overall chart from Tech Report :

It is a relief to see that my 9800 is still placed above - and way above - the FX line. This vindicates my choosing ATI over nvidia at the time. I mean, man, my overall fps average seems to be around 10 (10.2 actually). Imagine getting just half of that ! Almost makes me feel sorry for FX owners. And I know one personally.

Next year I will have to choose again, and this time the choice is not so easy. Indeed, although the X800 XT gets the crown, it is going to be prohibitively expensive. If I can go ATI, it will probably be with an X800 Pro. If I go nvidia, it'll probably be with a 6800 GT.

Now wait a minute. Both cards of my choice have almost double the score of my R9800 - but that just means that they'll only get 20fps average in 3DMark 2005. So, if I really want performance, it'll have to be with nvidia's SLI gimmick. Two 6800 cards, and my score should get boosted to at least 7000, maybe even 8000. And that should mean real smooth framerates in Half-Life 2, Far Cry and Quake IV.

Plus, you just have to take into account things like this. It looks like SLI is the only way to go for the future.

Meanwhile, I'm just about dead in the water.

Again.