I always think it's interesting when someone trys to find a deep meaning in a very limited synthetic benchmark. I have a 64MB Radeon and a Creative GeForce2 Ultra in my 2 machines respectively, and I'm very familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of both cards. There are so many things wrong with this, but I just woke up so I will only name a few.
1) The synthetic benchmark in question is
just that. A synthetic benchmark...... nothing more.
2) The benchmark in question was designed before the Radeon was even available, and it's not designed to measure many of the card's strengths and abilities.
3) There has been countless tests and reviews run with
real games (incuding T & L) that show the Radeon suffers a much less drastic performance decrease than the GTS when both the resolution and the polygon count rises. If anything, one could easily say the Radeon is
better prepared for the future games than the GTS, not the other way around as a couple of you guys have suggested. I'm not necessarily saying it is, I'm only pointing out the argument is strong in the other direction too.
4) Using the principle (kinda

) behind the problem with 2), we could look at the benchmarks comparing the
Environment Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM) performance of the Radeon core vs the GeForce core. Using
BumpEarth: Direct3D BumpMapping, the GeForce core reaches about 5 frames per second. The Radeon core reaches a whopping 1600 frames per second running the same test. That's right.... 1600 vs 5.
In fact, the GeForce performs so poorly that even
Intel's SiS630S integrated chipset beats it by a whopping 3000% with 152 frames per second in the same test. The GeForce core does not natively support EMBM, therfore it naturally gets crushed in this test. I would not start a thread about it though.
** Btw... EMBM is a
very cool effect. It's a shame the GTS won't be able to keep up with the new games that will support it.
5) There are
many things that make a video card a well rounded package. There is no single game, test, benchmark, (or person in a forum) that can define a card's worth.
6) Think of what would have happened if someone had started a thread called
"How weak is the GeForce2's 2D image quality..click to find out"
Now
that would have gotten ugly. (No pun intended

)
They are both great cards though, and I am continually amazed at some people's need to prove one
better in some way than the other. I take part in these discussions from time to time myself, but I pretty much spend
most of my time having fun with my cards playing kick-ass games.
Anyway, just my thoughts after waking up this morning. Excuse me if they are a little.... um.... what was I saying?
