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, PowerColor Radeon X300 SE HyperMemory 128 MB 64-bit achieved similar performace to Radeon X300 128 MB 128-bit (ATI), and it was 28.48% faster than i915G (Intel D915GEV).
PowerColor Radeon X300 SE HyperMemory 128 MB 64-bit was beaten by GeForce 6600 GT 128 MB (nVidia), which was 347.47% faster, Radeon X1300 Pro 256 MB 128-bit (ATI), which was 212.32% faster, GeForce 6600 128 MB (Albatron), which was 175.77% faster, GeForce 6200 128 MB 128-bit (Leadtek), which was 112.27% faster, GeForce 6200 TurboCache 64 MB 64-bit (XFX), which was 36.03% faster, Volari 8300 128 MB (XGI), which was 19.95% faster and GeForce 6200 TurboCache 16 MB 32-bit (Leadtek), which was 10.26% faster.
Enabling video quality enhancements, PowerColor Radeon X300 SE HyperMemory 128 MB 64-bit achieved similar performance to Radeon X300 128 MB 128-bit (ATI) and GeForce 6200 TurboCache 64 MB 64-bit (XFX), and it was 75.57% faster than GeForce 6200 TurboCache 16 MB 64-bit (Leadtek).
PowerColor Radeon X300 SE HyperMemory 128 MB 64-bit was beaten by GeForce 6600 GT 128 MB (nVidia), which was 449.76% faster, Radeon X1300 Pro 256 MB 128-bit (ATI), which was 285.50% faster, GeForce 6600 128 MB (Albatron), which was 204.83% faster and GeForce 6200 128 MB 128-bit (Leadtek), which was 111.79% faster.
