- New Patch for 3DMark03

Tero Sarkkinen from Futuremark let us know that they have released a new patch for 3DMark03 which helps reduce the effects of driver optimizations in the newest drivers from nVidia and ATI and so forth. Full details on the new patch can be found here.

UPDATE - Nordic Hardware has posted some benchmarks of Radeon 9800 Pro and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra comparing the results between build 330 and the new build 340. ATI performance hardly changes and is within the margin of error while nVidia performance is down almost 14% overall which may suggest nVidia had some dodgey forms of optimizations in place. You can see all the benchmarks here.

According to Tero Sarkkinen, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Futuremark Corporation, "the new version is published to make sure that our customers can get an objective 3DMark03 performance comparison with the latest hardware and drivers. Our customers will be able to perform apples-to-apples performance comparisons between the various IHVs' graphics cards."