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.

For the record, Albatron GeForce 6600 included in our comparison ran at 300 MHz and accessed its memory at 500 MHz.

3DMark05	Score	Difference
GeForce 6600 GT 128 MB (nVidia)	3584	6.10%
GeForce 7300 GT 256 MB 128-bit OC (Zogis)	3378
Radeon X1300 Pro 256 MB 128-bit (HIS)	2928	15.37%
GeForce 7300 GT 256 MB 128-bit (nVidia)	2763	22.26%
GeForce 6600 128 MB (Albatron)	2105	60.48%
GeForce 6200 128 MB 128-bit (Leadtek)	1542	119.07%
GeForce 6200 TC 64 MB 64-bit (XFX)	1331	153.79%
Radeon X300 128 MB 128-bit (ATI)	1114	203.23%
Radeon X300 SE HM 128 MB 64-bit (PowerColor)	1110	204.32%
Volari 8300 128 MB (XGI)	1010	234.46%
GeForce 6200 TC 16 MB 64-bit (Leadtek)	974	246.82%
i915G (Intel D915GEV)	346	876.30%

3DMark05 - AAx4, Aniso x4	Score	Difference
GeForce 7300 GT 256 MB 128-bit OC (Zogis)	2707
GeForce 6600 GT 128 MB (nVidia)	2591	4.48%
Radeon X1300 Pro 256 MB 128-bit (HIS)	2487	8.85%
GeForce 7300 GT 256 MB 128-bit (nVidia)	2253	20.15%
GeForce 6600 128 MB (Albatron)	1579	71.44%
GeForce 6200 128 MB 128-bit (Leadtek)	1162	132.96%
GeForce 6200 TC 64 MB 64-bit (XFX)	792	241.79%
Radeon X300 SE HM 128 MB 64-bit (PowerColor)	726	272.87%
Radeon X300 128 MB 128-bit (ATI)	722	274.93%
GeForce 6200 TC 16 MB 64-bit (Leadtek)	543	398.53%