http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=8031


Nvidia NV 31 and NV34 benchmarks

EXCLUSIVE 3DMark scores up

By Fuad Abazovic: Friday 28 February 2003, 00:13

IT FINALLY MAKES SENSE why Nvidia does not like 3dmark 2003 and why the company has even made public statements against it. We managed to get scores from the latest Futuremark benchmark tool after running it on 2 Nvidia cards that are yet to be introduced. They were the performance mainstream card NV31, likely to be called Geforce FX 5600, and the NV34 mainstream card with the possible name of Geforce FX 5200.

The machine these two cards were plugged into was an Athlon 2700+ with 512 MB of RAM. Very similar to the machine we use. The only card we have run 3dmark03 on before now was the Radeon 9700 PRO and that baby, as far as we can remember, scored around 4600 marks.

The faster of the two new Nvidia cards, the NV31 scored 2389. We cannot make a comparison to the Radeon 9500 and 9500 PRO as we are away from our LAB at the moment. If someone has a Radeon 9500 PRO and similar configuration we would like to update the article with its result as well.

You can note that card is about half the speed of the Radeon 9700 Pro.

Its mainstream brother, the NV34 was unable to score more than a thousand. To be precise it got 879 marks making it only 37% of the speed of the NV31.

These results may not reflect real in-game performance but sure can give you some conclusions about cards that are not so far away from being publicly launched.

It sure gives you a clue why Nvidia could be so harsh about Futuremark. It will be real interesting to compare these scores with RV280 and RV350, the soon to be introduced ATI parts.

We might just be able to do that on Tuesday when we got back to lab. µ