Numerous sources have confirmed that a Futuremark 3DMark 2003 score of12,535 has apparently been demonstrated by Nvidia on its pre-production engineering samples.
To put this in perspective, this story is brought to you by a tweaked AMD Athlon 64 FX system based on a Gigabyte GA-K8NNXP-940 mainboard with 1GB of Corsair XMS DDR, and is equipped with the current king of 3D gaming cards, an ATI Radeon 9800XT. This rock steady, real-world system benches a strong 7382 under 3DMark 2003 Build 340 at default settings, and indeed anything that can deliver a score over 7000 is pretty rapid.
Squatting on top of Futuremark's Top 20 'Hall of Fame'ous willy wavers is a heavily overclocked 4.5GHz P4 – seeming to need freezing to -85ºC to attain this frequency - with a well overclocked ATi Radeon 9800XT. This system, apparently, marks up a score of 10,008.
So, if what we're hearing about Nvidia's NV40 is true, then its sixth generation desktop 3D graphics accelerator is shaping up to be mighty.
Of course we can hear the critics cry "how come the last Futuremark 'Approved Drivers' to be used with Build 340 of 3DMark03 with Nvidia 3D accelerators are the ageing version ForceWare 52.16?"
That's a good question as these were released way back in October 2003, and the current Nvidia Forceware 56.72 was released just last week on April 1st., and the fourth driver release since the 52.16's which Futuremark have not approved for 3DMark03.
And we agree – this does cast some doubts on the validity of any 3DMark03 score achieved with any later Nvidia device driver, but today's news sure is more than interesting.
In back rooms at the CeBIT Messe, we heard talk of 3DMark03 scores of "over 10,000 3DMarks" for both ATI's R420 and Nvidia's NV40 but, for various reasons, we weren't particularly confident in our source. However, in light of today's news, we'll mention that that same source said that the ATI R420 was somewhat slower, though "not by much".
Sources close to ATI have said that a score of 10,000 3DMarks for ATi R420 "would be a dream", indicating that R420 Revision: CeBIT 2K4 wasn't pulling this level of numbers.
Perhaps we should all now be expecting briefings by Nvidia's competitors that 3DMark03 isn't now a valid indicator of 3D graphics performance?
