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 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 3DMark05 configuration, XFX GeForce 6200 TurboCache 64 MB 64-bit was 19.48% faster than Radeon X300 128 MB 128-bit (ATI), 19.91% faster than Radeon X300 SE HyperMemory 128 MB 64-bit (PowerColor), 31.78% faster than Volari 8300 128 MB (XGI), 36.65% faster than GeForce 6200 TurboCache 16 MB 32-bit (Leadtek) and 284.68% faster than i915G (Intel D915GEV).
XFX GeForce 6200 TurboCache 64 MB 64-bit was beaten by GeForce 6600 GT 128 MB (nVidia), which was 169.27% faster, Radeon X1300 Pro 256 MB 128-bit (ATI), which was 110.82% faster, GeForce 6600 128 MB (Albatron), which was 58.15% faster and GeForce 6200 128 MB 128-bit (Leadtek), which was 15.85% faster.
Enabling video quality enhancements, XFX GeForce 6200 TurboCache 64 MB 64-bit was 9.09% faster than Radeon X300 SE HyperMemory 128 MB 64-bit (PowerColor), 9.70% faster than Radeon X300 128 MB 128-bit (ATI) and 45.86% faster than GeForce 6200 TurboCache 16 MB 32-bit (Leadtek).
XFX GeForce 6200 TurboCache 64 MB 64-bit was beaten by GeForce 6600 GT 128 MB (nVidia), which was 227.15% faster, Radeon X1300 Pro 256 MB 128-bit (ATI), which was 202.53% faster, GeForce 6600 128 MB (Albatron), which was 99.37% faster and GeForce 6200 128 MB 128-bit (Leadtek), which was 46.72% faster.
