Shootouts

Q3 2006 Midrange GPU Shootout

By Vincent Chang - 4 Aug 2006

Results - 3DMark05 Pro & 3DMark06 Pro

Results - 3DMark05 Pro & 3DMark06 Pro

One of the big names when it comes to benchmarking, Futuremark's series of graphical tests has firmly entrenched itself in the industry, having gone through six revisions since 1999. Despite some controversial incidents in the past regarding its objectivity as a benchmark, 3DMark is a staple among hardware enthusiasts and review sites due to its ease of use and availability for casual users. The large installed user base also helps, along with the online comparison feature that allows enthusiasts to find out where their custom configurations rank.

We decided to include both the latest version, 3DMark06 and the older 3DMark05 because the newer 3DMark06 severely ups the ante on challenging your graphics subsystem and the typical midrange system may find it much too intensive. Users with these systems are unlikely to have transitioned to 3DMark06, hence 3DMark05 is still useful as a comparison, though its shader intensive tests would seem to give ATI's architecture the edge over NVIDIA.

As the results for 3DMark05 show, ATI cards all did extremely well for this benchmark, with the Radeon X1800 GTO leading the way. NVIDIA's GeForce 7600 GT only managed a slight lead over the Radeon X1600 XT and was distinctly behind the GTO. Even the weakest from the red team was able to match the GeForce 7600 GS in this benchmark and this situation remained throughout the testing, with or without anti-aliasing.

It was a closer fight between the top representatives from both sides in 3DMark06. The gap between the Radeon X1800 GTO and the GeForce 7600 GT was quite narrow at around 3%. However, the Radeon X1600 XT still outscored the GeForce 7600 GS for this benchmark. An indication of how much more intensive is the 3DMark06 version - the older GeForce 6600 GT could not complete the final test at 1600 x 1200 due to its 128MB frame buffer. Another point to note is that NVIDIA cards are incapable of finishing this benchmark at all settings. Due to its core architecture, they are unable to combine High Dynamic Range (HDR) rendering when anti-aliasing is enabled.

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