3DMark06
The Futuremark 3DMark06 benchmark was released many moons ago and has become a popular test for GPU benchmarks and CPUs as well. You can see my full overview of the new benchmark, what it has to offer over the 2005 version and some other initial scores from my previous article.Again, the standard benchmark on 3DMark06 is pretty pointless with these cards – the differences between them are small enough to be within a margin of error. What we want to see is the results of the synthetic test. One note: our Perlin Noise results turned out to be … um…hidden from us and since I was doing this write up on the road didn’t have access to test those numbers again before publication. We’ll update them soon though.
Looking at the synthetic tests here we see that the GTX 260 has a big improvement over the G92 cores in the pixel shader test, SM3.0 test and fill rate test (when looking at just single GPUs). Obviously the work that NVIDIA put into the architecture here is paying off.
It is impressive to see the power of two GTX 280s in SLI mode nearly matching the raw horsepower of three 9800 GTX cards even when it’s just synthetic pixel shading power.