Of course, real world applications give the best indication of performance in games that are currently available, however, since synthetics are designed from the ground up for testing, they often are able to stress hardware much more effectively than real-world applications. Being that DirectX 8 is just around the corner, we haven't seen any new additions to the benchmarking scene for a quite a while. Given a limited number of choices, we've selected 3D WinBench 2000 as our synthetic of choice because of its ability to test video hardware on a graphics level, rather than scoring system performance.

As the first card to break the 100 WinMark plateau, the Radeon's scores are admirable at the very least. Even with youthful drivers, the Radeon is 14-15% faster on each platform.

Interestingly enough, even with a feature set targeted towards DirectX 8, the Radeon is able to usurp the previously invincible GeForce2 GTS. We suspect that the situation will only get better once DirectX 8 is released and a new line of benchmarks are rolled out.