Sapphire PURE Innovation - ATI's Chipset for the AMD Enthusiast

Graphics Performance and Encoding

The 3DMark graphics Benchmarks from FutureMark show performance much as we expected. That is, the latest and fastest NVIDIA 7800GTX has a substantial lead over the ATI X850XT PE and the similar performing NVIDIA 6800 Ultra. 3DMark05, the latest Graphics Mark, also shows a comfortable performance lead for the ATI X850XT PE over the NVIDIA 6800 Ultra.

It is perhaps more interesting that the rest of our benchmarks don't reflect the same kind of domination by the 7800GTX that you might expect after looking at the 03 and 05 test results. This is just another example of benchmarks that are sensitive measurements of one parameter, like graphics performance, and may not be the best gauge of overall performance.

It has often been pointed out that encoding results should not be affected by the graphics card used during the encoding benchmarks. This is clearly demonstrated by the 17 test results for AutoGK using an AMD 4000+ processor with a wide assortment of other components. The performance range of those 17 encoding tests is just 47.9 to 49.3 - a difference from high to low of just 1.4 frames.