3Dmark06 quirks confuse us all

Regeneration · Posted by Regeneration on January 23rd, 2006, 09:46 PM

You'd expect wouldn't you, that the Radeon X850 XT PE - equipped as it is with a full sixteen pipelines - would be much faster than the new eight-pipeline X1600 XT card. We're not suggesting that the RV530-based X1600XT is a bad card. On a contrary it's a great card for the money, but it's certainly not designed to be a match for the R480-based Radeon X850 XT PE. But 3Dmark06 seems confused. Since, in this test, the Radeon X1600 XT card will kick the Radeon X850 XT PE's performance butt.

Read it @ The Inquirer

09:54 PM

Sounds like it's time for a real benchmarking test to see how these cards work in a gamers environment ... not one of these synthetic tests

!!

If I had some cards, I'd pull out my copy of BenchEmAll! Go for an apples to apples, set the visual quality the same (drop the X1600 down and turn off HDR and SM3), than run the tests again...

EDIT: Ahh, should have read the article first. It's skewed because of ShaderModel 3 support and HDR support. The X850XT PE doesn't support these, and hence has a harder time making the game look the same (which is why the performance is so much slower). It's like trying to make a GeForce FX card run DirectX 9.0c video instead of DirectX 8.1!