Thirteen graphic accelerators and one testing suite…

Xbit labs tested 13 state of the art video cards with the latest Futuremark benchmark suite, 3DMark 2003. When this benchmark first was released, NVIDIA criticized it, stating that it does not resemble real-time situations. (NVIDIA’s performance was not too good those days…) Now, it turns out that, after the release of NVIDIA’s 42.68 driver ATI is no more the all time winner. However the nature of the optimizations contained within 42.68 are still discussed widely since sources indicate that these do in fact “cheat” by forcing FP16 instead of 32. Take any bench with a grain of salt until we see WHQL-certified drivers.. 

“First of all, we should congratulate NVIDIA and the company’s software developers. Their 42.68 drivers helped GeForceFX 5800 Ultra based card to outrun its main rival, RADEON 9700 PRO nearly in all the tests and resolutions. We won’t say anything about the price-to-performance ratio of the two leaders in the current graphics card market, as the price of GeForceFX 5800 Ultra has not yet been finalized. You can only be sure that it’s going to
be VERY expensive.”

You can find the review here.