3DMark05 measures performance by simulating DirectX 9.0c games, i.e., using the new Shader 3.0 model. This programming model is used by Far Cry game and other games to be launched in the future. This new programming model is used by GeForce 6 and 7 series from NVIDIA and Radeon X1000 series from ATI.

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 note 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 3DMark05 configuration, ATI Radeon X1300 Pro also has achieved a very good performance, being slower only than GeForce 6600 GT (which was 27.73% faster than the card being reviewed).

Radeon X1300 Pro was 33.30% faster than GeForce 6600 128 MB (Albatron), 81.97% faster than GeForce 6200 128 MB 128-bit (Leadtek), 110.82% faster than GeForce 6200 TC 64 MB 64-bit (XFX), 151.89% faster than Radeon X300 128 MB 128-bit (ATI), 152.79% faster than Radeon X300 SE HM 128 MB 64-bit (PowerColor), 177.82% faster than Volari 8300 128 MB (XGI), 188.09% faster than GeForce 6200 TC 16 MB 32-bit (Leadtek) and 710.98% 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 8.14% faster than the reviewed chip.

Radeon X1300 Pro was 51.74% faster than GeForce 6600 128 MB (Albatron), 106.20% faster than GeForce 6200 128 MB 128-bit (Leadtek), 202.53% faster than GeForce 6200 TC 64 MB 64-bit (XFX), 230.03% faster than Radeon X300 SE HM 128 MB 64-bit (PowerColor), 231.86% faster than Radeon X300 128 MB 128-bit (ATI) and 341.25% faster than GeForce 6200 TC 16 MB 32-bit (Leadtek).