Futuremark 3D Mark
The 3D Mark benchmark applications are one of the first stress tests for any incoming review sample. Futuremark's software may not be representative of gaming performance, you do get an idea on what we can expect from a new set of videocard’s. Besides that, a 3D Mark test session requires only 2 clicks and after approx. 10 minutes you get a score which should indicate the speed of your pc configuration. Do keep in mind that 3D Mark tests the entire hardware setup; results do not always reflect the power of the graphics card alone.
The older 3D Mark series are very CPU dependant, 3D Mark 2001 and 3D Mark 2005 scale very well up to a point where a fast CPU is mandatory to show any difference in frame rate. Our Core2Duo setup overclocked to 3,6GHz is not of the slowest gaming config, with graphic cards of this caliber we shouldn't be looking at the older 3D Mark series anymore. Except for 3D Mark edition 2003, this tool still scales very well with dual video cards and likewise performance increments, the über overclocked XFX 8800GTS 320MB logically came out here as fastest video card.
The Galaxy 9600 GT OC showed us some interesting results to start with; the average 3D Mark score of 38304 made the Galaxy card come out as second best card here, beating the all mighty 8800 GT!
In 3D Mark 2006 we got nearly the same situation, the XFX Fatal1ty claims first spot easily, but this time it is the 8800 GT who gets the second place, shortly followed by the overclocked 9600 GT branded Galaxy. The standard 9600 GT is around the same performance level as the ATI HD3870, I believe we'll have a tight fight in the following pages.
3D Mark is far from a realistic test environment, let's head on to our five game tests which should give you a much better view at what to expect from the current mainstream video cards.
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The problem was that one of the standard overclocked cards became instable whenever being put through heavy 3D rendering tasks, downclocking it solved the problem so I guessed we got stuck up with a bugged card (remember the news regarding transient voltage fix on 9600GT's).
Now, nearly one week after launch date, there seems to be something sneaky going on with NV9600 series. NVIDIA has changed the ways clocks are being build up. Earlier, a 27MHz crystal was used, the clock frequency got multiplied and devided until you get the final clockspeed, 650MHz for example. With GeForce 9600GT the GPU core frequency is based on the PCIe speed, the downside here is that my system always is configured with a 110MHz PCIe clock, making the 9600GT used in our article extra overclocked by another 10%!
So... let me warn you here: the results obtained in our article are based on a system using 110MHz PCI-Express clock instead of 100MHz, this difference stands for a 10% overclock on the 9600GT core clock and will have its impact on total system performance.
This being said, we will fix our way of testing in upcoming articles. Those who are still puzzled, don't hesitate to ask around what I was trying to explain here above, but I insist you have a read at our source, thank you techPowerUp!