On May 15, ExtremeTech presented the test results of its investigation of nVidia's performance on 3DMark2003. We suspected nVidia was falsely optimizing for the benchmark with its new GeForceFX 5900 Ultra product. On May 23, Futuremark confirmed our suspicions with a detailed report on extensive "driver cheats" by nVidia along with some ATI anomalies. At the same time, Futuremark released a new version of the benchmark that defeats nVidia's detection/special-casing techniques.
Based on that information, we quickly took Futuremark's latest version of 3DMark2003, which is designed to negate those cheats, and put the products to our own tests. This story details our independent analysis of all eight false nVidia optimizations revealed by Futuremark, along with ATI's and nVidia's scores using this latest 3.30 version of the 3Dmark2003 benchmark. We believe, finally, that this is an accurate representation of relative performance between nVidia's top-of-the-line GeForceFX 5900 Ultra and ATI's Radeon 9700 Pro. Read on for the whole truth.
|