3Dmark2000:

3Dmark2000 is much more the benchmark for gamers because it's based on a game engine itself. Another thing to note is that the '3Dmark' score is different from '3Dmark99', very different. So don't judge just because the marks are far lower than you might be used to, they are actually higher.

Game1 is a helicopter that flies over an immaculately detailed 3D landscape covered with trees, lakes and various military vehicles. This is easily the most demanding test when in 'High Detail', the landscape turns into a dense forest, which puts even the most sophisticated systems through their paces. As such the GeForce fairs pretty well, this is the point at which you notice little difference between the P3 and K7 systems on the SDR.

The reason is the whole point for the GeForce existing, the fact that all the complex 3D is being carried out on the card itself and not the CPU. However the instructions that are done on the CPU obviously allow the Athlon to push that little bit further ahead. What's really interesting is that in 'High Detail', the DDR board is barely ahead of the SDR; this is because the amount of textures has changed little compared to the Geometry. Time to investigate the memory speeds a little more:

The most obvious thing is that the SDR card with its single memory transfers can't do 64Mbs of textures, where as the DDR with its Dual pipes can. So obviously the DDR is fast outstripping our now humbled SDR, still that aside and the SDR's speeds remain impressive. It's now quite easy to see that DDR cards are only really useful for games with a lot of textures or that you run in super high resolutions. Remember the SDR card comes with 32mbs of RAM, it's unlikely many games will require more than that so it begins to make you wonder what the point of the DDR is so early on in the GeForces life? We ran a full 3Dmark2000 benchmark and decided to check out the '3Dmark' scores:

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