3DMark is a widely used and accepted benchmark that stresses the DirectX performance of a VGA card. For testing the performance of each card we use the 4 game benchmark 3DMark offers. The first is a DirectX 7 game, the second and the third use DirectX 8 and the last one stresses graphics in DirectX 9. A very strong point of 3DMark is that its VGA card measuring does not require a lot of CPU power. So the resulting fps are a good reference of a VGA card's rendering performance.

The supremacy in performance with 3D graphics over the Intel CPU can be easily seen in the graph above. The P4 660 and the AMD 3800+ reported similar performance, while the 4000+ approaches the FX-55 CPU.