3D Mark 2001, Continued
For the time being, GeForce3 is able to beat the young Radeon 8500 in pixel shader stuff and the bump mapping (which is pixel shader stuff as well). However, it seems as if GeForce3's vertex shader performs rather badly. Radeon 8500 scores almost twice as high in this test.
Summary 3D Mark 2001
In this comparison 3D Mark 2001 has proven to be an invaluable tool to evaluate the performance of modern 3D-chips, making further gaming benchmarks almost obsolete.
Radeon 8500 is clearly suffering from an ineffectively used high-bandwidth memory interface. This can hopefully be sorted out with a better driver. We should not forget that it took NVIDIA almost 6 months until they had a driver that can use GeForce3's crossbar memory controller as effectively as Detonator 4. Still, there is no excuse why Radeon should perform worse than GeForce3, bearing in mind that it has the higher core clock and memory bandwidth.
NVIDIA, the proud provider of the very first 'GPU' with integrated 'T&L' should be a little bit ashamed for the bad figure that GeForce3 makes in the T&L-performance chart. ATi has clearly overtaken NVIDIA on that one. Nobody knows if the T&L-performance really matters, but NVIDIA was the one that told us how important T&L is. It should go without saying that we expect the fastest T&L units from NVIDIA, not from ATi.
