The links worked! ;)

Thank goodness ATI cheated first with the 8500, or you would have a point DigitalWanderer. To think that in all the other tests the 5900 beat the snot out of the 9800 were completely true since they weren't optimized for should be more proof of its superiority, right? ;)

In most other benchmarks I have seen except 3d Mark 3, FX 5900 reaches excellent scores. So I can defenitly not say that I bother. Best Regards JemyM

it's faster than your 9700, with or without 'optimisations'

Surely you could list at least some. Otherwise I will have to understand it as 'almost all' and because this is not happening on my GF4 I will think this is just a case of user interference. C'mon, give at least some specific texturing problems. That way other GF4 owners can either help confirm the problem or let you know that maybe you should look into other areas of your system for the solution. I have not seen any texturing abnormalitites yet. I have not tried 3Dmark2003 and I do not consider it important.

An article like this implies that 3Dmark 2003 is an important piece of software. It is not. Anyone who buys a graphics solution based on 3Dmark scores is doing themself a disservice. This is not meant to excuse cheating, but if we look at the big picture then 3Dmark has been cheating all along by implying that their scores reflect real-world performance. The fact is that real games are taxing in more ways than graphics and that this tends to even the field out. Besides, isn't it FS and Anisotropic anti-aliasing that everyone wants these days? Shouldn't everyone be running this 'benchmark' with these settings on? I will hypothesize that if Futuremark released a benchmark that ran below 1 fps on most hardware it would have zero popularity. Why do I believe this? Because I think most people, like myself, like just seeing what curent hardware can render and say "wow!". Then it becomes an addiction to raise a score which is a game in itself. Ironically, some people actually 'play' 3Dmark and are very open about it. This makes perfect sense. These people study how scores can be improved and then build systems to achieve the highest score. They enjoy this aspect. JCViggen comes to mind. What these people tend not to do is go apeshit about how this means something other than a higher score in 3Dmark.

lol nvidia. go bite my stinky army boot!