AMD Athlon 64 3800+ - Page 7

Futuremark 3DMark03

3DMark is a widely used and accepted benchmark that stresses the DirectX performance of a VGA card. For testing the performance of each card, we use the 4 game benchmark 3DMark has. The first is a DirectX 7 game, the second and the third use DirectX 8 and the last one stresses graphics under DirectX 9. A very strong point of 3DMark is that its VGA card measuring does not require a lot of CPU power. So the resulting fps are a good reference of a VGA card's rendering performance.

GT3 - Troll's Lair	GT4 - Mother Nature

Using our Sapphire 9800 Pro ultimate VGA card (for which, you can read our review here), we got 100 more 3dmarks under 64-bit Windows.

Taking a closer look at the 3dmark03 benchmarks, we can see that this virtual difference in the total result is due mainly from the drivers DirectX 7 performance in the first test, Wings of Fury.
On the next two DX8.1 tests, the x64 drivers show that they can't hold the lead and definitely lose it on the final game, which benchmarks DX9 performance.

Of course, the difference of a single frame per second is ridiculously small and not even worth considering, but it still indicates a small decline in x64 performance.

Let's move on to the next test.