Thoughts from the vendors and Futuremark
We asked NVIDIA, ATI and Futuremark to comment on 3DMark05 as whole, including the means of accelerated PSM rendering on NVIDIA hardware that was included in the engine. ATI are the only party to respond thus far, I'll update the page as and when they respond.ATI's Richard Huddy had this to say.
ATI welcomes the introduction of 3DMark 2005 and we are pleased to observe that, yet again, ATI's hardware has been shown to be the fastest in the market today. The victory is all the more impressive when you take into account the fact that our main competitor, by default, runs a special vendor-specific fast path which is of lower quality (see the discussion on PCF and DST), and disabling that path for them improves ATI's lead by almost 10% of the total score. We're disappointed to see that Futuremark didn't choose to add support for 3Dc texture compression which would have demonstrated an even greater advantage for ATI hardware and technology.
We invite everyone to benchmark in the same way as we like gamers to be able to play their games; use high resolutions, turn all the settings to max and select the highest detail levels. That should sort the men from the boys!
And one final thing... Benchmarks don't just test graphics cards, they also test drivers. Every review should use drivers which are available to the general public and never use drivers which are produced just to win benchmarks. ATI is proud to announce that the drivers we have recommended for use in this review are all available from ATI.com
Thanks,
Richard "7 of 5" Huddy
European Developer Relations Manager, ATI.
