Looking Back Pt. 3: The 6800 Ultra, ForceWare, and the Future

3DMark05

As we continually note, 3DMark isn't something we normally use in an article due to its nature as a synthetic benchmark instead of being a real game. That said, it's an excellent diagnostic tool both for its wide customizability and the ability to render specific frames. However, it's also highly prone to being manipulated (both fairly and unfairly) due to the value some groups attach to it, so while it has little worth as a real-world gaming benchmark, it's a great indicator of just what kind of performance improvements a company can wring out of a video card when given the proper motivation.

We should note that because of NVIDIA's unusual driver release mechanisms, only a handful of the drivers tested here are actually Futuremark approved, whereas nearly every Catalyst driver we have tested has been approved. We do not have any reason to believe NVIDIA has been cheating in these cases, however.

The 60.72 drivers once again created a problem for us with 3DMark05, as attempting to run the benchmark would simply reboot our testbed. At this point we have some significant concerns over the quality of launch drivers in particular, but that's for another article. The 61.76 drivers have also been dropped, due to 3DMark05 not offering the ability to use the SM3.0 profiles with these drivers, and as a result the score would not be comparable with the other drivers.

Past that, we're particularly surprised with the results, as NVIDIA does not appear to implement any significant performance optimizations for a 3DMark. As we've mentioned before, with 3DMark's synthetic nature, we'd rather see NVIDIA and other GPU manufacturers put engineering resources into improving game performance rather than benchmark performance, and we're glad to see that this is the case.

ForceWare 66.72 versus 84.21
Mouse over for 84.21

Image quality once again remains unchanged, which is a good thing to see given NVIDIA's history with 3DMark03.