Futuremark's Latest Attempt: 3DMark06 Tested

Performance Tests

We ran several tests with the latest version of 3DMark to see what kind of results we would get across a range of NVIDIA and ATI cards. There are a number of different tests that 3DMark can perform to stress different aspects of the system, but the three tests that we will be focusing on here are Shader Model 2.0 graphics, HDR/Shader Model 3.0 graphics, and the overall score. Here is what we tested:

NVIDIA 6600 GT
NVIDIA 6800 GS
NVIDIA 7800 GT
NVIDIA 7800 GTX
NVIDIA 7800 GTX 512
ATI X800 GTO
ATI X1300 Pro
ATI X1600 XT
ATI X1800 XL
ATI X1800 XT

MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 Processor
2x512MB OCZ 2-2-2-6 1T DDR400 RAM
Seagate 7200.7 120 GB Hard Drive
OCZ 600 W PowerStream Power Supply

The 3DMark06 benchmark is very straightforward. There are different settings that can be changed such as resolution and Anti-Aliasing, and clicking "Run 3DMark" will run the demos back-to-back and display the results when finished. For these tests, we chose the default resolution of 1280X1024 (no AA or AF).







(Note that in the HDR/SM3.0 graph, the X800 GTO is not included as it is incapable of rendering these effects.)

We can see by the graphs that 3DMark's graphics tests favor NVIDIA hardware over ATI, which is a further illustration of why 3DMark isn't really the best program for performance testing between cards. We know that different games tend to do better or worse on different hardware depending on the way the game was made, so a tool like 3DMark won't necessarily determine which card would be best suited for a specific game. This is an important fact for users in the market for a new card to realize before they spend their hard-earned money.

3DMark06 is a very stressful benchmark and as could be expected, some of the less powerful cards ran the demos very slowly. Because the graphics are so intensive, the effects were quite stunning, especially on the high end cards like the 7800 GTX (512) and the X1800 XT. During the firefly scenes, the warm glow of the fireflies in the night created intricate, hypnotic reflections of the foliage, and the brilliant white of the snow and sun in the arctic outpost demo at the end were striking. But at the end of our testing, we are mostly left with shallow beauty rather than a deep, meaningful connection. The overall 3DMark scores don't really give us much more information than we already have; other than simply letting us know what hardware runs 3DMark better.