FutureMark released a patch with build 340 for 3DMark03 a few houres ago and Nordic Hardware has already a few test results online featuring the ATi Radeon 9800 Pro and the NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra with respectively Catalyst 3.9 and ForceWare 52.16 drivers.
With the new patch for 3DMark03 we will give you a glimpse of how the performance is affected by it. The primary goal with this patch, according to Futuremark, is to make graphic cards to be compared on equal basis. Our interpretation: build 340 prevents cheating with drivers. Now let's see if there is any difference.
ATi looses only a small percentage in some test with a maximum performance drop of 2.4% in the Ragtroll test. NVIDIA his losses are a lot bigger. Up to 26.8% less FPS in the Vertex Shader test and also big losses in some other tests. Some of the test results stayed the same for both ATi and NVIDIA and some showed a slighly higher performance.
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