ATI has announced that its flagship next-generation card, the RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition, has set a world record score of 15,738 in 3DMark2003. This remarkable feat means that ATI have surpassed nVidia's 12K+ score, claimed to have been achieved using a GeForce 6800 Ultra, a score which was not replicated by hardware web sites.
A score of that magnitude not only means that ATI claim the 3DMark world record but that they have also built-up a significant lead from their rivals since 3K+ 3DMark points now separate them, an even bigger lead if the average score of 11,600 is accepted as the GF 6800s final yield.
Until now it was accepted by many that ATI would win at real-world gaming tests while nVidia would, in an ironic twist, hang on to 3DMark supremacy, this announcement casts some significant doubt over nVidia's ability to bounce back, even though it is expected that a GF 6800 Ultra Extreme board (450 MHz core clock, 1100 MHz GDDR3, 16 pixel pipelines, USD 599) will be announced shortly.
The system used by ATI to achieve this score was highly overclocked so it remains for us to see how the retail version of the card will compete with nVidia's flagship offering, provided one is announced. It is unlikely however, that the X800 XT Platinum Edition will disappoint, considering such impressive results and the fact that nVidia has already used up its 16 pipeline ace.
So at the System Builder Summit in Barcelona ATI claim to have achieved a new world record score of 15,738 using Futuremark's 3DMark03 graphics benchmark, easily breaking the previous, official score of 10,008, which was also set using ATI graphics technology.
The record score of 15,738 in 3DMark03 was set using the default screen resolution of 1024x768 pixels with 32-bit color depth, as required by Futuremark for eligibility in Futuremark's Hall of Fame. A record score of 33,484 was also set in Futuremark's popular 3DMark2001 benchmark at the same resolution.
Scores in UT2004 (147 fps) and Tomb Raider (76 fps) were posted using the most demanding image quality settings commonly used by the gaming community: 1600x1200 pixels with 32-bit color depth using 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering.
All applications were run on a system featuring an overclocked RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition running at 715 MHz engine clocks and 639 MHz memory clocks, an overclocked Intel Pentium 4 Processor, 1 GB of DDR SDRAM, a 40 GB IDE hard drive, proprietary cooling technology, and CATALYST drivers that conform to the Futuremark specification for posting Hall of Fame benchmark scores.