System Requirements

Cough, cough, cough, oh and ask yourself is your state of mind ready to read what follows? It has been general practise that each new 3DMark calls for ever growing hardware requirements be it more system memory, more GPU memory, higher support for Pixel/Vertex Shaders or faster processors. This isn't itself a bad thing, after all evolution does have its own appetite and as the saying goes, there is no such thing as a free lunch in this world. Nonetheless, back to the topic of system requirements we go and one really does wonder is it fast hardware that becomes slow or software that mutates into Godzilla like hunger. Whichever it is, 3DMark06 is a beast to feed and feed it you must if one expects any joyful smooth eye candy. Try running 3DMark06 with anything less than a Geforce 7800 GTX or Radeon 1800 XT and you'll get, well not much really and that's basically it, in a nutshell of course. The long answer does however sound somewhat less daunting for the very simple reason – some scenes within the demo (and benchmark) are less taxing than others. For instance parts of 'Firefly Forest' such as the bug climbing a leaf is average at most but the sunshine from behind the rocks in 'Canyon Flight' and specifically the city at the very end is so intensive, it makes present day graphics cards weep for mercy. 3DMark06 now also requires 256MB of local memory on the graphics card to run smoothly and while 128MB will still work, it does seem the days of 128MB is coming to an end folks. For those lucky enough to run the demo at 1900x1200 you belong to a rare breed indeed. Without further ado then and straight from the horse’s mouth if you will, below are the strict system requirements as contemplated by our good friends at Futuremark.

- DirectX® 9 compatible graphics adapter with support for Pixel Shader 2.0 or later, and graphics memory of 256 MB or above.
- Intel® or AMD® compatible processor running on 2.5 GHz or above.
- 1GB system memory or more.
- 1.5GB of free hard disk space.
- Windows® XP operating system with the latest Service Pack and updates installed.
- DirectX 9.0c (December 2005) installed with the latest updates.
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 installed, for some 3DMark functionality.
- Microsoft Excel 2000, 2003 or XP for some 3DMark functionality.
- Microsoft DirectX 9.0c (December 2005) System Development Kit is required to run the image quality test using the reference rasterizer.

Benchmarking this new beast

As with such a demanding array of 3D eye candy, one really should test it out with the best currently available consumer level graphics cards. Confident this theory is nothing short of excellent, we took liberty bringing in two of the best boys in town – eVGA and Gainward. Both observed as long time favourites between enthusiasts with desire in fine tuning their products for added performance, who better to execute this demanding job. With our plan set, we quickly got our hands on two Nvidia 7800 GTX chipset 512MB graphics cards from either camp, grabbed a coffee and sat down to have a long play with each. It is at this point we discovered eVGA sent us a sample clocked at 600/1800 and Gainward 580/1760, both up from the default Nvidia 550/1700 7800GTX 512 reference design. Confident this could be bested we drank more coffee until without volt modding achieved 600/1900 on the Gainward and 600/1880 on the eVGA. These increases represent 9% more on GPU frequency and 11.7%/10.6% for the memory respectively. This is more impressive considering the Gainward isn't from the famous "Golden Sample" series. The BIOS for both cards was 5.70.02.25.5A dated November 23rd 2005 (eVGA) and 5.70.02.25.GP dated November 17th 2005 (Gainward). Armed with such might it was natural progression to commence with benchmarking.

Test setup

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 @ 2600MHz
Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2 (32 bit)
Memory: 1GB (2 x 512MB) Crucial Ballistix PC3200 (2-2-2-5)
Graphics card: Gainward 7800 GTX 512MB, 81.98 version driver
Graphics card: eVGA 7800 GTX 512MB, 81.98 version driver
Motherboard: DFI Lan Party UT NF4 Expert (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset)
Power Supply: Akasa PowerPlus 650W ATX 2.01

Benchmark results