The Big GPU Shootout: Part I, Upgrade Now or Wait?

3DMark06

3DMark06 still remains the number one utility for a system benchmark. The numbers it produces aren’t necessarily indicative of real-world gameplay or any gameplay in general, and for that reason we really dislike using it to compare different systems. However, as long as the rest of the tech world uses it to evaluate gaming performance, we will also. We find it mostly useful for tracking changes in a single system. There are four mini-games that it uses for benchmarking graphics, as well as two CPU tests. The scores are “weighed” and added together to give an overall number and there is a further breakdown possible.

Above is “Firefly Forest”, a scene from one of the four benchmark “mini games” used to benchmark GPU performance.  It will give your PC a real workout!

Here are the results of our 3DMark06 benchmark comparison:

The results are pretty self-explanatory.   We can see the ranking and we note that HD4870x2 scales well but Crossfire X-3 barely scales with this combination of drivers/HW in this synthetic benchmark.

When we briefly tried our older Intel CPU, e4300 – even when it was overclocked from its stock clock of 1.8 GHz all the way to 3.33 GHz – it still falls rather short of e8600 at its stock clock of 3.33Ghz. This is probably because of e8600’s much larger cache and newer optimizations. It is noticeable even with a single HD4870-512MB video card. We can also see that when you are using a card of the 4870X2 class, it starts to make a significant performance difference. So we decided to do all of our video card testing with e8600 at its stock clock for this article. Later we will overclock e8600 to near 4 GHz, and then again compare video performance with its stock clock.

We also noted that overclocking our HD4870 didn’t give too much performance increase and we will compare all of video cards at their reference stock clocks for this series.  For example, with our e4300 at 3.33Ghz, we raised our 4870’s clocks from its stock of 750/900 all the way to 820/1165 yet only raised our 3DMark06 score from 13023 to 13334.  So we decided to do the rest of our testing with all of our GPUs at their reference stock clocks.