3D Mark 2000, from MadOnion.com (formerly FutureMark) is a suite of benchmark tests designed to stress the Direct3D performance of your video accelerator by providing a controlled "real-world" gaming environment. Based on the Max-FX game engine and offering support for most of the features offered by DirectX 7 such as hardware T & L, SSE and 3Dnow! Accelerated geometry calculations, Bump-mapping (yes, environmental as well) and more, 3D Mark 2000 has become our benchmark of choice for testing DirectX 7 performance and compliance, now let's get on with the scores:
The effect of the increased memory bandwidth offered by DDR RAM is apparent throughout as you can easily tell, but the performance gains are most noticeable at the higher resolutions and color depths where memory performance is stressed the most. While the SDR based LeadTek board is some 22% slower in 1024 x 768 at 32-bit than at 16-bit in our 3DMark tests the DDR based Outrageous 3D GeForce DDR is just 9% slower in 32-bit than it is at 16. The same is also true at 1280 x 1024 where the SDR board takes a performance hit of roughly 36% while the DDR board takes a hit of "only" 26%.
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