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OCAU News |
3DMark03 Rumblings..
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(link) Friday, 14-February-2003 13:32:18 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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There's something of a furor surrounding 3DMark03, the latest version of this popular 3D benchmarking tool released a few days ago. In case you missed it, we have a mirror of the (184MB!) install file here. A lot of people are questioning the rendering methods used in the benchmark and the huge disparity between results shown by, well, anything vs the Radeon 9700. Most of the reviews have a strong questioning of the relevance of this benchmark, particularly for comparing how different video chipsets handle the kind of work they'll need to do in actual games. NVIDIA have even gone so far as to say they don't consider it a valid benchmark, which is a big change from their previous support of 3DMark2001. 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.
Anyhoo, reviews on Tech-Report, THG (thanks Dave), Bit-Tech, ExplosiveLabs and HardWareMania (with ATI Catalyst 3.1 drivers). Scroll down for some further comments on HotHardware's news page. HardOCP have an interesting take on the whole shebang, which is rebutted in this editorial on Bit-Tech.
What's my take on it all? Will we use 3DMark03 in our reviews? Of course. We'll also use 3DMark2001SE-330, Quake3 timedemos, benchmarks in current games and whatever else looks like an interesting way to test cards. If one benchmark seems to look way off the curve in terms of results, then we'll note that in the review. I think using any one benchmark in isolation is a pretty bad idea regardless. Also, 3DMark03 is still a serious workout for any system, so where we're not directly comparing video cards (say, a motherboard comparison using the same video card) it'll be a definite addition to our benchmark suite.
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