Mobility Radeon HD 3470 vs Gaming System in the year 2001

I have the following system
Core 2 Duo T9600, 2.8GHz, 1066MHz FSB
3GB RAM DDR2-800
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470, 256MB VRAM

I know the GPU is slow by today standard but I wonder how fast this card would compare with the fastest desktop gaming you could buy in the year say 2001? If I could bring my laptop in a time machine and go back to the year 2001, would I be able to brag that I have the fastest gaming machine in the planet? How about 2002, 2003, 2004? What would be the year when the fastest desktop gaming system would beat the performance of my notebook? And what card is that?

 

LOL

You built a time-machine man

Gimme the blueprints

as for the actual question, I'm not too sure

But should beat the rigs from 2001 methinks

 

it would humiliate any of the cards in 2001. Do you have a time machine? can I borrow it for a minute, please? =)))

 

im pretty sure that card would stomp anything in 2001 since "AGP" was still being introduced and and the pci-slot would be the bottleneck even if they did have powerful cards.

 

Me and you would OWN and PWN with our cards

Don't lend it to anyone with a 17", or we'll get killed

 

youre wrong) in 2001 every machine already had at least AGP 4x

 

You want a complete picture, run 3Dmark03. Like all 3DMark's, getting over 10k was the holy grail when it came out. Watch what that system does.

 

Thanks. I run it and I got 6266. So, how does it stand?

 

Are you sure it was 03, not 06

That score seems low

 

And how can he get those scores for 3dmark 06?

 

well, if it was 06 then the card will only pull 2000 points or so

 

My bad

Wasn't thinking straight, a little sleepy

 

Forget 2001, the Mobility 3470 would be equivalent to top end cards from 2005.

Consider this benchmark:

http://www.rage3d.com/reviews/software/3dmark06/index.php?p=4

The 6800 and X850 series ruled the roost in 2005, and they top out at around 2300, while the 3470 gets around 2000.

 

if i'm correct, GeForce Ti 4600 was the top dog in 2001.

 

Wow, has it really been that long since that came out? I feel old.

I don't think you can really compare the HD 3470 to any cards circa 2001. I say this because the API of those cards was more primitive than even the lowest of the low-end cards of today. For instance, the HD 3470 can run DirectX 10.1 while the best card back then could run, what? DirectX 8.0? Big difference. Not to mention if you look at the games that came out then, many still were using sprites. I distinctly remember the controversy surrounding Warcraft 3 when it came out in 2002 about the transition from sprites to polygons. It is much more complex than this though because of the long transition it took for games as a whole to make: remember, Quake came out in 1996 and ended the era of sprite based FPS while it took about 5 more years for other genres to make the leap. Of course this debate can really all be moot since all games back then could easily be played on the HD 3470.

 

Ah how times have changed. I look forward to a couple years from now where hopefully an integrated GPU can beat the daisies out of today's 9800 GTX SLI rigs or what have you.

 

I feel the newer cards are better optimised for benchmarking softwares so they will give good scores. However the ancient 6800 still races ahead of the 3470 by a considerable margin in games like Oblivion and Crysis.

 

Me too

 

That would be awesome.

 

How'd you guys forget the CPU? The T9600 would absolutely trash any P4/Athlon from those days But doesn't the 3470 have a 64 bit bus? I'm sure the top cards back then had at least 128. There are a lot of things to consider, but I'd bet the 3470 could at least hang with an x800? It would destroy a ti 4600 lol.

Ok, try PCmark05. Compare to these...

 

A couple more thoughts about this:

The top card in 2001 was the GeForce 3 Ti 500. The GeForce 4 Ti series didn't start to ship until early 2002 (we aren't even going to count the MX series). I had a GeForce 3 Ti 500. I forget who had actually manufactured the card but it came equipped with 64 MB DDR memory, and it served as my pride and joy until I "upgraded" to a GeForce FX 5600 (which was really a downgrade given the bad pixel shader performance) in late 2004. I remember playing Doom 3 on that old GeForce 3 (yes, it could do that--and at medium settings, 1024x768 too!).

As far as performance wise, the CPU does make a big difference--not to mention the RAM as well. Overall, the PCs of today are several orders of magnitude better than the ones in 2001 and any low-end system of today armed with even an Intel X4500 could probably beat the best rigs of 2001. Hell, I remember back in 2005 my old Inspiron 9300 equipped with an ATI Radeon X300 could whip my old P4 GeForce FX 5600 desktop (yes, I know--should have gone with the GeForce 6800).

The GeForce 3 Ti 500 had a bus width of 128. However, it didn't matter as most cards didn't even take advantage of that since they came equipped with just 64 or 128 MB of DDR memory.

EDIT: By the way, check out this article on Wikipedia to get a good idea of the differences between the different cards then and now: Comparison of nVidia GPUs