3D Mark 2001SE

This marks the last time we'll be using Futuremark's 3D Mark 2001SE. The benchmark has served us well over the past couple years, but it is a couple years old, and todays video cards just aren't stressed hard enough by it. We tested at a variety of resolutions, at default settings.

3D Mark 2001 SE, No AA, No AF

3D Mark 2001 SE, 4xAA, No AF

Given that both cards use the same memory and GPU, it should come as no surprise that the scores are essentially the same. This is a far cry from past All-in-Wonders where the cards would use the same technology as the vanilla desktop ones, but clocked much slower.

Given the scores above, 3D Mark 2001's time in the sun has passed. With 4xAA, the 9700 Pro still stays above the 11 000 mark at 1024.

3D Mark 2003

There was a lot of controversy when Futuremark released their latest version of 3D Mark. We here at VL prefer to place emphasis on real-world benchmarks, but I am aware that many people still like nice round numbers from running this benchmark.

3D Mark 2003, No AA, No AF

3D Mark 2003, 6xAA, 16xAF

After a year of seeing five digits 3D Mark scores, it was quite a knock back down to reality seeing sub-5000 scores. I tried to get 1600x1200, 6xAA and 16xAF working, but neither 9700 Pro would cooperate here. It seems what we were constantly running out of memory, so it looks like we'll be seeing 256MB video cards soon.

Code Creatures

This is a DX8 benchmark that makes good use of vertex and pixel shaders. Given that the AiW 9700 Pro is a DX9 part, we can get an idea of how it will handle an older video shader specification.

Code Creatures No AA, No AF

Code Creatures 4xAA, 8xAF

The AiW 9700 Pro handles the benchmark well, but we're not talking about 100+ framerates this time around. There's a hit once we turn on the AntiAliasing and Anisotropic Filtering, but it's at 1280 and up that we get the largest changes.

With the synthetic benchmarks out of the way, let's look at some real-world situations.