Top 5 3d Mark Holders are an AMD / nVIDIA combination

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Futuremark.com 's website community , where benchmarkers submit their 3d marks score , all the top 5 scores are from an AMD ,

Here is the link -

*service.futuremark.com/compare?2k3=3654675

Its interesting to see what happens after intel releases their 6xx series of CPU's and of course the DUAL CORE CPU's from both the CPU giants .

u can never say anything with these benchmarks!!

new driver version and kabooom

It's got more to do with the video card than with the processor. nyone can see that the AMD64s beat the living s**t out of the P4s when you pump up the resolution and the eyecandy.
And its a lot more than the newer drivers or the shader profile programming. The very architecture of the Nvidia cards are biased towards the 3DMark benchmark process. I dont think you guys would have forgotten how sneaky the Nvidia guys got with 3DMark03 and the cheating in the rendering process. Bl00dy cheating %@#%^&*@!@)
You have to understand the Nvidias support accelerated depth maps and depth stencil textures (DSTs) which arent yet part of the DX9.0 specification. However, 3DMark05 scans the target hardware and if it finds that it can use DST, it goes ahead and enables it. Also, when it comes to filtering, the Nvidia Percentage Closest Filtering (PCF) is pretty much non-standard and while the ATIs have to have a program to handle this, its just bundled on the Nvidias for free in hardware mode.
For a TRUE result of the comparison between ATI and Nvidia, you have to turn off DST from the 3DMark interface, but somehow I doubt if the guys posting the top scores in ORB actually did this. So in the end, Futuremark actually is a bit biased towards Nvidia, and Nvidia also includes a lot of shortcuts to get better scores in the benchmarks. Why else would they allow an Nvidia only specification to make it to the final build and influence the final score?

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Nvidia cuz they have SLI right now, but then comparing SLI to ATi's single cards isn't really a apples to apples comparison. Things will change once ATi unveil their AMR technology.

But being totally and horrendously unfair is what the top score posters are doing by posting SLI boosted scores. The guy posted a score of 24890 3DMarks with two 6800 Ultras in SLI. How can the ATIs even match that now?

And even when ATI does challenge the Nvidia SLI with AMR, 3DMark will still post a better score with Nvidias than with the ATIs because of their "tweaks"

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Hmm .......tweaks yeah but i am sure with AMR the performance crown goes back 2 ATi (only for mutli gpu solutions) For single GPU solutions the X850 XT PE is the best right now...........

You said it, when it comes non-specific gamecode implementations for a particular hardware, ATI beats the Nvidias hands down. But then, I guess coding the engine with a particular target hardware in mind has become the fashion these days and games sporting the Nvidia and ATI logos for best performance have become all too common.

Hopefully, this is a thread that pretty much affected a lot of people when it came to game performance. How many Nvidia GeForce FX users were deprived because Valve claimed that the FXs cannot handle the 9.0 specs properly and they had to use the 8.1 pathway.

I got the reflections patch installed, but still, it looks a billion times better on a 9600 than on my 5950.

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well it depends upon the personal view.
The damn X850XT is soo expensive i could get 2 PCI express 6800GTs for the price of that. And no way even X850XT will match the power of 2 6800GTs.
Thats been the problem for ATI ever since the launch of their X8XX series.
They are not able to roll out enough high end cards in the market, hence they are expensive.
6800 series is good series. Yes, single ATI solution is better at top end market. But at mainstream, enthusiast level no ATI solution is good enough or available in good quantities.
Its been what? 3 months or so when ATI announced X800XL and still they are not available in good numbers.
I was die hard ATI fan for last 3 years when i used 9500 then 9700 pro and then 9800XT. Sadly this time around X800XT was too damn expensive compared to 6800GT which i got.
And by the way, Athlon64 and Athlon FX are the best gaming processors out there.

You're right, sadly. The X8XX series has been woefully hard to find, some dealers I've spoken to appear to be completely in the dark about such cards even existing and the ones that do quote out of this world prices and exorbitant delivery dates. I was planning to upgrade my computer in April, and I think I will just stick to the 6800GT, considering how widely its available, and the recent price drops.