HP Blackbird 002 High Performance Gaming System
More 3DMark06 and F.E.A.R.
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3DMark06 |
3DMark06 is the most recent addition to the 3DMark franchise. This version differs from 3Dmark05 in a number of ways, and includes not only Shader Model 2.0 tests, but Shader Model 3.0 and HDR tests as well. Some of the assets from 3DMark05 have been re-used, but the scenes are now rendered with much more geometric detail and the shader complexity is vastly increased as well. Max shader length in 3DMark05 was 96 instructions, while 3DMark06 ups that number to 512. 3DMark06 also employs much more lighting and there is extensive use of soft shadows. With 3DMark06, Futuremark has also updated how the final score is tabulated. In this latest version of the benchmark, SM 2.0 and HDR / SM3.0 tests are weighted and the CPU score is factored into the final tally as well. |
In these graphs, we've compared the performance of the Blackbird 002's GeForce 8800 Ultra's running in SLI mode to our own independant tests that used reference NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra and GTX cards. Although the Blackbird 002 pulled off another victory, please note that our GPU test bed used only a Core 2 Extreme X6800. So despite its much higher clock speed, the Blackbird 002 only pulled ahead by a couple of hundred points.
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F.E.A.R |
One of the most highly anticipated titles of recent years was Monolith's paranormal thriller F.E.A.R. According to the game's minimum system requirements, it needs at least a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 with 512MB of system memory and a 64MB graphics card in the Radeon 9x00 or GeForce4 Ti-classes or better, to adequately run. Using the full retail release of the game patched to v1.08, we put the graphics cards in this article through their paces to see how they fared with a popular title. Here, all graphics settings within the game were set to their maximum values, but with soft shadows disabled (Soft shadows and anti-aliasing do not work together currently). Benchmark runs were then completed at a resolution 1920x1200, with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled. |
Once again, the Blackbird 002 squeeked by our reference machines. With F.E.A.R. running in this configuration though, the test is much more GPU bound, hence the similar performance between the two GeForce 8800 Ultra SLI rigs.
