Albatron GeForce FX 5950 Ultra

Once we shifted from speed to quality, the lead the 5950 UV took, over the 9800 XT, went from significant to substantial.  I found this hard to swallow right off so I whipped out an OpenGL oldie but goodie, Quake III.  Using the Guru of 3D's Q3Bench program, we tested both cards in "normal" and "max detail" settings.

Not quite the same shellacking here but it seems like the NVidia based card likes OpenGL better than the ATi based board.

Let's move on to some synthetic benchmarks.  First up are FutureMark's 3D Mark 2003 and 2001 SE.  Both were patched with the 340 and 330 patch respectively.

1/19/2004 - Editor's note and edit

We have pulled this and all our 3D Mark 2003 scores as a result of our perception that Futuremark's 3D Mark 2003 results are skewed and unreliable.  As such, are not an effective measure for measuring performance.  For a further explanation click here.

 

I think this goes to show you that synthetic benches have their place but don't necessarily mean diddly when it comes to real world game play.  It also seemed odd that the Futuremark benches would show results not in line with out testing so far.  Just an observation. 

Next up are AquaMark v3 and Code Creatures, which is a very intensive bench that brings most GPU/VPUs to their knees.

Code Creatures and AquaMark 3 seem to be saying something other than the two Futuremark benches.

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Pg.1 - Introduction
Pg.2 - The Card
Pg.3 - Testing (UT2003)
Pg.4 - (UT2003 / Serious Sam: TSE)
Pg.5 - (Quake III, FutureMark, Code Creatures, AquaMark)
Pg.6 - Overclocking
Pg.7 - Image Quality and Conclusion