3DMark 2003

[Jon P. Inghram]

Woot, I just wasted all that time to download a pile of festering whale dung. Not surprised though. It's a good benchmark if you want to know how well your system will run games written by, for example, aborted kangaroo fetuses.

[drslump]

Having a Parhelia I guess I'll have to wait for FutureMark to release a service pack before this test have any meaning in my system.

[lecter]

Or more likely until Matrox release official DX9 drivers....

[Wombat]

Or...ummm.....yeah

[Helevitia]

Originally posted by WyWyWyWy
http://216.240.159.13/Public%20Folder/3DMark03.exe

this one is okay.
the german server kind of died....

This one gave me 350k/s. FYI

Dave

[WyWyWyWy]

That gave me 30kps, which is pretty good for UK cable modems...

[SteveC]

NVIDIA:
"3DMark03 combines custom artwork with a custom rendering engine that creates a set of demo scenes that, while pretty, have very little to do with actual games. It is much better termed a demo than a benchmark. The examples included in this report illustrate that 3DMark03 does not represent games, can never be used as a stand-in for games, and should not be used as a gamers’ benchmark."

NVIDIA:
"Unfortunately, Futuremark chose a flight simulation scene for this test (game 1). This genre of games is not only a small fraction of the game market (approximately 1%), but utilizes a simplistic rendering style common to this genre. Further, the specific scene chosen is a high altitude flight simulation, which is indicative of only a small fraction of that 1%."

"For all intents and purposes game tests 2 and 3 are the same test. They use the same rendering paths and the same feature set. The sole difference in these tests appears to be the artwork. This fact alone raises some questions about breadth of game genres addressed by 3DMark03. --- These two tests attempt to duplicate the “Z-first” rendering style used in the upcoming first-person shooter game, “Doom 3”. They have a “Doom-like” look, but use a bizarre rendering method that is far from Doom 3 or any other known game application."

"Finally, the choice of pixel shaders in game tests 2 and 3 is also odd. These tests use ps1.4 for all the pixel shaders in the scenes. Fallback versions of the pixel shaders are provided in ps1.1 for hardware that doesn’t support ps1.4. Conspicuously absent from these scenes, however, is any ps1.3 pixel shaders. Current DirectX 8.0 (DX8) games, such as Tiger Woods and Unreal Tournament 2003, all use ps1.1 and ps1.3 pixel shaders. Few, if any, are using ps1.4."

"This year’s 3DMark has a new nature scene (game 4). It is intended to represent the new DirectX 9.0 (DX9) applications targeted for release this year. The key issue with this game scene is that it is barely DX9."

Ahhh poor nVidia can't handle being beaten by ATi

[Novdid]

I hear they backed out of futuremark's beta program...

[Paddy]

623 marks

[SteveC]

Bit silly now though that a 1Gig CPU with a 9700 Radeon is twice the performance of a 3Gig CPU with a GF4... this can't be used as a system comparison any more. It can only be used to compare raw graphics performance, can't it? It's no longer a System 3D performance test, but I can't decide if it's better now that it's a real 3D graphics card test.

BTW: Something's wrong on my system - I get a black screen for the 3rd 3D test and 2nd CPU test but end up with over 9000 points! :nuts:

[Novdid]

You cheater!!!

Sounds a little strange.

There are other parts that annoy me. Although the fps counter floats steadily between 30 and 40 on the three last game tests it stutters like mad. It's not pleasant to look at a stutter show like that. The CPU test that runs at an ultra low rate of 5fps feels more fluid than the test. This is with a 9700Pro scoring between 4100-4200.

But somehow I have a feeling that the next driver release from ATI is going to remedy that little annoyance and boost the score by a healthy amount.

[Indiana]

Originally posted by SteveC
Ahhh poor nVidia can't handle being beaten by ATi

NVidia never could handle being beaten by anyone else. Not in the G400Max vs. TNT2 times, nor when looking at the Kyro incident with the ridiculous "internal" PowerPoint presentation.

Novdid: Yes, although those Catalys 3.1 definitely are the best drivers for the R300 up to now (providing a healthy speedup, that might lift the 9700Pro over the GF FX Ultra, at least when FSAA is used), the release notes state that 3DMark03 performance is lower than it should be with this set.

[Umfriend]

"Unfortunately, Futuremark chose a flight simulation scene for this test (game 1). This genre of games is not only a small fraction of the game market (approximately 1%), but utilizes a simplistic rendering style common to this genre. Further, the specific scene chosen is a high altitude flight simulation, which is indicative of only a small fraction of that 1%."

Hummm, prop fighter sims is the only thing I play nowadays. This is the bench for me then alright, gonna dl it tonight. LOL
Umf

[Paddy]

Anyone got the new nature test to run?

What's it like?

[Guru]

Originally posted by SteveC
Bit silly now though that a 1Gig CPU with a 9700 Radeon is twice the performance of a 3Gig CPU with a GF4... this can't be used as a system comparison any more. It can only be used to compare raw graphics performance, can't it? It's no longer a System 3D performance test, but I can't decide if it's better now that it's a real 3D graphics card test.

Or a 1.8GHz p4 radeon 8500