Asus Extreme N6600GT

Review Pages

1. Introduction
2. A closer look
3. Test System
4. 3DMark05
5. 3DMark 2003
6. Codecreatures
7. Half life 2
8. Doom 3
9. Far Cry
10. Medal of Honour Pacific Assault
11. Thief 3
12. Colin McRae 05
13. Ground Control II
14. Overclocking
15. Conclusion

05 - 3DMark 2003

3D Mark is a widely used and accepted benchmark that stresses the DirectX performance of a VGA card. A very strong point of 3DMark is that its VGA card measuring does not require any CPU power. So the resulting fps are a good reference of a VGA card's rendering performance. For testing the performance of each card, we used the 4 game benchmarks from 3DMark.

3Dmark03 also includes sound and CPU tests as well as some other feature tests.

- Game Test 1 - Wings of Fury (DX7)

This test is a combat flight simulator written for older hardware (DirectX 7). Particles are used a lot in this test - smoke and vapor trails, flak and gunfire, and explosions are produced using point sprites and quads.

- Game Test 2 - Battle of Proxycon (DX8)

This test is a simulation of a first person shooter game. 1.1 and 1.4 Vertex shaders are widely used since all character models are skinned using vertex shaders.This makes this test a good vertex shader comparison for VGA cards.

- Game Test 3 - Trolls' Lair (DX8)

This test should be the favorite of all RPG lovers. It is a cut scene of a female warrior facing two malicious trolls. Again, the same vertex and pixel processing is used as in game test 2.

This test also uses post-processing effects, such as Depth of Field and Bloom effects which are widely used in today's game cut scene sequences.

- Game Test 4 - Mother Nature (DX9)

Mother nature represents the level of effects and realism that are possible using 2.0 vertex and pixel shaders, plus some other features that DirectX 9 offers.

In 3DMark03's GT1,GT2 and GT3 we see the Asus 6600GT producing excellent framerates compared to the HIS X700 pro. The difference between them varies from 9 to 26 fps. However, that difference is lost in the final Game Test where once again, an ATi card holds the top position.

- 3DMark Official score

If you test your machine with 3DMark you can post the results at 3DMark's online results page. For more information visit futuremark.com.

Despite the great DirectX 9 performance of the X700 pro, it did not save the card's overall performance and so it falls 1000 points behind the 6600GT that provides an excellent framerate under all four game tests.