Now that we’ve gotten OpenGL performance out of the way, on to the Direct3D benches. The most popular synthetic Direct3D benchmark is MadOnion's 3DMark2000.

3DMark2000

Again we see the faster processor speed blowing the scores of the 550 out of the water at the lower resolutions. There's still quite an advantage of having the faster processor until you reach the 1027x768 @32bpp settings where the card becomes the bottleneck.

Next up is the Evolva demo which was develped by the folks over at at Computer Artworks. A patch was recently added to Evolva which provides DOT3 bump-mapping which takes full advantage of the pixel shading capabilities of the NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer.

Unfortunately, I was only able to benchmark using the standard resolution which is fixed at 1024x768 at 32 bit color. It wasn't until MikeC began editing the review that I found out the Evolva demo can be run in other resolutions by using Regedit and modifying keywords under the following path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Computer Artworks\Evolva Rolling Demo\1.0

Thanks to BenSkywalker for that tip.

Next Page: Overclocking & Conclusion