3DMark 2003 Build 340

3D Mark it's 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 in DirectX 9. A very strong point of 3DMark is that it's VGA card measuring is does not require any CPU power. So the resulting fps are a good reference a VGA card's rendering performance.

3Dmark03 also includes sound and CPU tests as well as some other feature tests. In this page we offer the average FPS on the game benchmarks, having Asus X800 XT compared with Gainward's 6800 Ultra, Aopen Aeolus 5900 XT and Exair Radeon 9800XT.

- Game Test 1 - Wings of Fury (DX7)

This test is a combat flight simulator written for older hardware (DirectX 7). Particles are used a lot in this test - smoke and vapor trails, flak and gunfire, and explosions are produced using point sprites and quads.

There are plenty planes but their polygon frame rate is low, as well as single textured background object are used. Hence the average fps (frames per second) are high for all cards.

The X800 XT card indicated very high performance on this test. This shows it's very good capability rendering older games based on Microsoft's DirectX 7.0.

- Game Test 2 - Battle of Proxycon (DX8)

This test is a simulation of first person shooter game types. 1.1 and 1.4 Vertex shaders are widely used since all character models are skinned using vertex shaders.This makes this test a good vertex shader comparison for VGA cards.

It is widely known that shaders are ATI's chipsets drawback. This test, which uses vertex shaders 1.1 in a high extent, places Asus' X800 XT just behind the 6800 Ultra for about 7 fps. In the latest games (e.g Doom 3) that use shaders 3.0 things get worse for ATI's cards.

- Game Test 3 - Trolls' Lair (DX8)

This test should be the favorite of all RPG lovers. It is a cut scene of a female warrior facing two malicious trolls. Again the same vertex and pixel processing is used as in game test 2.

This test also uses post-processing effects, such as Depth of Field and Bloom effects which are widely used in today's game cut scene sequences.

When rendering complicated graphical effects the situation is similar with just 9 fps behind the powerful 6800 Ultra.

- Game Test 4 - Mother Nature (DX9)

This game test represents the level of effects and realism that are possible using 2.0 vertex and pixel shaders, plus some other features that DirectX 9 offers.

The Radeon series are slightly more capable processing vertex and pixel shaders 2.0, according to this test.

Surprisingly things turn upside down on this test which uses pixel shaders 2.0.

- 3DMark Official score

If you test your machine with 3DMark you can post the results at 3DMark' online result browser. For more information visit futuremark.com.

For only 74 points the Asus AX X800 XT is back from the 6800 Ultra. This is very good results indeed having that Gainward's 6800U is setted at higher clock speeds.