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Christmas DX9 Graphics Card Round Up
Written by Peter Barnard, Spode (12/12/2003)
Page 6 of 10

Untitled Document

Synthetic benchmarks and quick performance comparisons..

About the benchmarks

For those who are not familiar with the benchmarks used here, a quick explanation is in order. 3dmark 2001 and 3dmark 2003 are synthetic gaming benchmarks based on a range of real game engines. The scores are only comparable with other scores from the same version. The main difference between the 2001 and 2003 versions is that 2003 uses DirectX 9, whilst 2001 uses 8.1.

Aquamark is a synthetic gaming benchmark using DirectX 9 and the Krass game engine.

All of these benchmarks are run at default settings, 32 bit colour with no antialiasing, at 1024 by 768. This table shows approximately what scores are needed for gaming at these settings, with low, medium, and high detail levels.

  Low Medium High
3dmark 2001 4,000 8,000 12,000
3dmark 2003 1,000 2,500 4,000
Aquamark 3 3,000 7,000 20,000


The Results and Comparisons

The difference column shows the difference between the 3.2 GHz score and the 1.6 GHz score, as a percentage, giving you some idea what the performance penalty is like for running each card on a slower system.

The Quick Comparison column shows the relative performance of each card, at 3.2 Ghz, with the fastest card being shown as 100%, and the rest as a percentage of that score.

The Combined Quick Comparison is the average of all three percentages, giving a comparison that encompasses both DirectX 8.1 and DirectX 9.0 scores.

3dmark 2001
3dmark 2003
Aquamark 3
 
Combined Quick Comparison 
 
1.6 GHz
Difference
3.2 GHz
Quick Comparison
 
1.6 GHz
Difference
3.2 GHz
Quick Comparison
 
1.6 GHz
Difference
3.2 GHz
Quick Comparison
Asus 9800XT
12,197
33%
18,286
100%
 
5,897
8%
6,423
100%
 
35,245
23%
46,156
100%
 
100%
Sparkle 5900
10,702
33%
15,870
86%
 
4,297
9%
4,889
76%
 
34,260
11%
38,168
82%
 
81%
Gainward 5900
10,775
31%
15,703
85%
 
4,199
11%
4,717
73%
 
33,897
10%
37,566
81%
 
79%
Asus 9600 XT
10,515
20%
13,283
72%
 
3628
5%
3,838
59%
 
28,395
10%
31,308
67%
 
66%
Sapphire 9600 pro
9,806
17%
11,885
64%
 
3,240
4%
3,397
52%
 
24,374
7%
26,188
56%
 
57%
Sparkle 5600
8,277
20%
10,345
56%
 
2,116
5%
2,223
34%
 
17,285
1%
17,331
37%
 
42%
Terratec 5600
7,939
20%
9,872
53%
 
1,998
4%
2,081
32%
 
16,840
1%
16,876
36%
 
40%
Terratec 5200
5,185
7%
5,555
30%
 
873
4%
900
14%
 
7,669
0%
7,669
16%
 
20%

A few common trends are shown up by these figures. Higher end cards are more heavily crippled by a slower PC, but slow cards do not perform significantly better with a fast PC. It seems that the speed of the PC only acts as a bottleneck, which will determine the upper limit of your possible graphics performance, unless the limits of the graphics card are reached first.

We can also see that 3dmark 2003 is a less CPU sensitive benchmark than 3dmark 2001 and Aquamark is even more CPU independent. This is useful as we have more chance of testing the graphics card rather than the overall system performance.


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