News Big anomalies found in 3DMark03 [What - Again?!]

From the Inquirer:

THERE'S AN INTERESTING report on Ace's Hardware today called 3DMark03 Performance Factors.

Brian Neal reports that while testing, Ace's came across benchmark results that showed a 350MHz Pentium II with PC100 memory and a Radeon 9700 Pro knocked the socks off a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 with dual channel PC2100 memory and a Radeon 9600 in three out of the four 3DMark03 benchmarks.

So does that mean that 3DMark03 ignores practically everything in a system than video cards?

We won't spoil it by reporting the results, but suggest you get over to this page forthwith and see what the whole article has to say.

That's the full Inq article, but here's a link for completness.

Can anybody trust benchmarking tools such as 3DMark03 anymore, what with the continuing revelations over cheating, tweaking and other dodgey goings on with them?

 

I never even bothered with 03 to start with. Lost total interest in 3dmarking now. Only benchmark id use is UT2003 if i had too. Not really much point in benchmarking now - as long as it's as fast as you need it to be, what's a 100 points difference gonna really make?

 

isn't exactly news to me! it's been known since it's release that 3dmark03 is incredibly video card dependant, i don't see anything new here.

i only went from 5269 to 6534 when i swapped out a pentium3 800 @ 900mhz, and 256mb 150mhz ram for an athlon @ 2.3ghz and 512mb 200mhz ddr ram. both using a rad9800 pro.

i wouldn't call it an abnormality either, it just demonstrates how the benchmark does a very poor job of providing information that is relevant to gaming performance. the only purpose it serves at the moment is as a competition for overclockers.