3DMark03 measures performance by simulating games written to DirectX 9, which are contemporary games. In this software we ran two tests, both at 1024x768x32. Since we were evaluating low-end video cards, we decided to not run our tests in higher resolutions, since rarely a user that buys a video card from this level will push resolutions above 1024x768 in 3D games.
We ran this software first without antialiasing and with no anisotropic filtering, and then we put the antialiasing at 4 samples and anisotropic filtering at 4 samples. This improves the video quality but lowers the performance. We were willing to see how much performance we lost by putting the VGA to run at the maximum possible image quality. It is important to notice that ATI chips can run at 6x antialiasing. Since nVidia chips cannot run at this configuration, we had to use 4x antialiasing to use a configuration that is valid to all video cards included in our benchmark, allowing direct comparison between them. Also, some very low-end video chips (Volari 8300 and Intel i915G) don’t have antialiasing feature, so we were not able to benchmark them using this configuration.
At the default 3DMark03 configuration, ATI Radeon X1300 Pro has also achieved a very good performance, being slower only than GeForce 6600 GT (which was 43.27% faster than the card being reviewed).
It was 13.25% faster than GeForce 6600 128 MB (Albatron), 47.13% faster than GeForce 6200 128 MB 128-bit (Leadtek), 129.59% faster than GeForce 6200 TC 64 MB 64-bit (XFX), 160.38% faster than Volari 8300 128 MB (XGI), 183.26% faster than GeForce 6200 TC 16 MB 32-bit (Leadtek), 212.32% faster than Radeon X300 128 MB 128-bit (ATI) and Radeon X300 SE HM 128 MB 64-bit (PowerColor) and 301.26% faster than the on-board video produced by Intel 915G chipset.
Enabling video quality settings, the same happened: Radeon X1300 Pro lost only to GeForce 6600 GT, which was 42.61% faster than the reviewed chip.
It was 26.46% faster than GeForce 6600 128 MB (Albatron), 82.02% faster than GeForce 6200 128 MB 128-bit (Leadtek), 277.92% faster than GeForce 6200 TC 64 MB 64-bit (XFX), 284.59% faster than Radeon X300 128 MB 128-bit (ATI), 285.50% faster than Radeon X300 SE HM 128 MB 64-bit (PowerColor) and 576.81% faster than GeForce 6200 TC 16 MB 32-bit (Leadtek).
