Getting the most out of 3DMark06

WE CAN GET into heated performance competitions with, say, twin GeForce 8800GTX in SLI. See, for example, the recent article on doing it in HD. And, in a few months, R600 in kludge-less CrossFire, and will achieve record 3DMark scores - especially if there is a nice CPU to run the whole thing as well.

What about lower-end cards? Any way to up their 3DMark06 scores up without spending $$$ on a faster card, or overclocking the existing one to death? It isn't usually done on every new card's benchmark test due to space and deadline constraints, but it was worth trying it here when time allowed.

I decided to test how far we can go just by optimising the driver settings this time - the test bed was my very old & rarely used Asus A8R-MVP32 2x16 Crossfire mainboard based on RD580 chipset for the AMD, running an AMD Athlon FX-60 dual core 2.6 GHz CPU, off 1 GB Corsair XMS3200XLPro DDR400 CL2225 memory.

Not exactly the lowest-end setup, but less that what you'd see as top notch gaming platform today. The graphics card was HIS X1900GT IceQ3, a simple, cheap yet fast and overclockable card with a good cooling system. I ran the Catalyst 6.11 driver, didn't bother to upgrade to 6.12 since the existing one ran without a hitch.

The 3DMark06 Pro gave us 3787 overall score in SXGA 1280x1024 and 4702 score in 'low end' XGA 1024x768 resolution. At the XGA level, the SM 2 score was 1625, while the SM 3 test result was 2096. Not bad, for default driver configuration. Then I went into the Catalyst Control Center, moved the 3-D settings to "performance" and mipmap to "performance" setting as well.

When the 3DMark06 was ran again in XGA mode, the total score jumped off to 5346 (SM 2 score 1945, SM 3 score 2384 this time). Umm, just two changes in the driver setting give us 15% extra 3DMark score? There is no guarantee this would translate to a tangible game play benefit, but again, for all of you thinking of throwing away your year-old card just because it doesn't feel as fresh compared to the new bunch, well try squeezing the most of it first by optimising your driver settings - not to mention getting the newest driver or, well, overclocking the card if it's good for it. µ