3DMark2001SE & 3DMark03
It may be a £50-£60 video card and lack some of the more expensive card's compression features, but it can run all of our benchmarks without having to skip for hardware reasons. That's where the current FX range is markedly ahead of the older Ti series. We'll start with 3DMark2001SE.3DMark 2001SE b330
- Author: MadOnion/Futuremark
- DirectX Class: 8.1
- Pixel and Vertex Shaders: Yes (Nature test) PS1.1/1.4
7,872 marks is a respectable figure for a budget card. The overall score is no doubt helped by the use of an Athlon 64 Model 3400+ CPU. That may sound like an odd combination at the best of times, but large OEM builders often combine a high-speed CPU and low-end card. Have a look at PCWorld's machines for an example of just this kind of component selection.
3DMark03 b340
- Author: MadOnion/Futuremark
- DirectX Class: 9.0
- Pixel and Vertex Shaders: Yes (all tests) PS1.1/1.4/2.0
The host processor can't do much to help in the GPU-taxing 3DMark03. That's precisely why scores start off poor and drop off. 1,497 marks doesn't quite tell the full story. The benchmark was often reduced to a slideshow and rendered almost unwatchable. You can imagine the added performance hit that antialiasing and anisotropic filtering had on framerates. Even at the outset, it would appear prudent to switch some of the quality settings off if fluid gameplay is required.
