Gaming benchmarks
Gaming benchmarks are conducted using a reference GeForce 6800 GT 256MB AGP card.
I chose to run an older variant of Futuremark's synthetic benchmark due to its sensitivity to changes in the subsystem. Newer iterations are more GPU bound. Having said that, there's very little between the two S754 chipsets, according to the results obtained in 3DMark2001SE. Can you still remember the days when obtaining 10,000 was considered difficult?. I certainly can.
Comanche 4, however, does seem to run consistently better on an nForce3-equipped board.
Our low-details UT2003 benchmark is run at 800x600. That, when run with a high-end card, puts a significant onus on the subsystem to crank out geometry. Too close to call, again.
DOOM 3's in-built Timedemo 1 is surprisingly system limited at 1024x768. Run the same test with a Sempron 3100+, for example, and the average framerate drops to around sub-70FPS.
