The third game test from 3DMark05 can’t be fit into a definite genre: a zeppelin is flying along a canyon and is attacked by a giant monster. This test is the most difficult as it uses sophisticated pixel shaders to render the water and the walls of the canyon. There’s only one light source, however, - the sun.

It’s similar to the second test ?the RADEON X800 cards have the best scores. Among the lesser folk, the GeForce 6600 GT AGP wins the first two resolutions, but is hindered by its narrow 128-bit bus in 1600x1200. As for the PCI Express platform, the RADEON X8x0 models are on top. The relatively inexpensive RADEON X800 XL matches the performance of the GeForce 6800 GT. The GeForce 6600 GT is a little faster than its rival, again save for 1600x1200 resolution.

Turning on full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering we change nothing in the sector of top-end graphics hardware, but the RADEON 9800 XT overtook the GeForce 6600 GT AGP thanks to a higher-performance memory subsystem, and the RADEON X700 XT did the same with the PCI Express version of this GeForce.

Overall, the victory of the RADEON X8600 and X800 families in 3DMark05 looks well deserved as they are faster than their NV40-based opponents in a majority of subtests.

The NVIDIA SLI platform worked well in both versions of 3DMark that we used (well, these are the most popular benchmarks and no wonder NVIDIA supported them in its ForceWare driver). The SLI technology almost doubled the performance, both with two GeForce 6800 Ultra and with two GeForce 6600 GT cards.

So, this is the end of our tests and it’s time to do some summarizing.