PNY GEFORCE FX 5600

BENCHMARKING:
3dmark2001 SE is a very popular benchmark that has been broadly used to evaluate Microsoft's Direct X 8.0 and 8.1 graphics hardware. This test is primarily composed of fixed-function DX7-style rendering, with a bit of DX8-style pixel shaders included on a few specific tests. Because the FX 5600 is aimed at the midrange market 3dmark2001 SE is a useful tool for gauging performance in recent games.

Resolution	Filtering	NO AA NO AF	2x AA 2x AF	QxAA 3x AF	4xAA 8x AF
1024x768		9415	7302	7044	5081

Resolution	Filtering	NO AA NO AF	2x AA 2x AF	QxAA 3x AF	4xAA 8x AF
1280x960		7354	5329	5103	3347

The tables above show what the card is capable of at resolutions the average gamer would use. The results without AA or AF show the FX 5600 scoring in the region of the Geforce 4 TI 4200. At 1024x768 the card maintains perfectly playable frame rates even when 4xAA and 8xAF are used. In the High detail game tests the card remained over 30fps for the vast majority of the time and never fell below 20fps. At 1280x960 4xAF 8xAF was not playable. However most settings below that were perfectly useable.

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3dmark03 is the newest benchmark from Futuremark, and the only benchmark in common use that is designed specifically for Direct X 9.0 graphics hardware.

This test is especially challenging in that it exerts a heavy pixel shader and vertex shader load on the graphics adapter. Today's popular game titles still tend to use a fixed-function DX7 style of rendering, with a few optional shaders thrown in for special effects. While the current crop of game-based benchmarks can be made to create a heavy fillrate load (by increasing resolution and adding AA and/or AF), they do not stress the portions of the graphics processor that will become critical in next-generation titles - the shader engines.

3dmark03 contains multiple scenes that are completely shader-driven and as such is highly valuable as a forward-looking benchmark test.

Resolution	Filtering	NO AA NO AF	2x AA 2x AF	QxAA 3x AF	4xAA 8x AF
1024x768		2359	1616	1542	1190

3dmark03 stressed the FX more than any other program used in this review however the 5600 came through with a perfectly respectable score of 2359, when you look at it scoring the same as a 4200 in 3dmark01 then in 03 scoring more than a TI4600 the future proofing involved in purchasing a Direct X 9 card begins to show. There were however big hits in performance when AA and AF were used.

Codecult, a Phenomedia Group company, announced the release of a new 3D graphics benchmark based on their CodeCreatures 3D engine. The game development system was recently presented at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California. Broad acception among reknown developers has sparked Codecult to release this benchmark.

The Codecreatures benchmark is written with Microsoft's DirectX 8.1 API and incorporates the use of Vertex and PixelShaders popular on next generation 3D accelerators. The benchmark plays a photo-realistic nature scene and calculates the performance of the graphics adapter by measuring the fps that it can display at 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions. The score is a geometric mean of those three resolutions called the Codecreatures number.

At standard settings (1024x768 and no AA or AF) the FX shows the following results. To give you an idea of relative performance a TI 4200 scores around 25fps with a Radeon 9700 scoring in the high 30’s. As with the results on 3dmark01 the 5600 is hitting just below the score range of the lower end Geforce 4 TI cards.

Applying 2xAA and 4xAF at 1024x768 gives us a small decrease of around 16%

Finally here are the results for 1280x1024, 2xAA and 4xAF: