3DMark2001SE	Source: FutureMark

By combining DirectX8 support with completely new graphics, it continues to provide good overall system benchmarks. 3DMark2001SE has been created in cooperation with the major 3D accelerator and processor manufacturers to provide a reliable set of diagnostic tools. The suite demonstrates 3D gaming performance by using real-world gaming technology to test a system's true performance abilities. Tests include: DirectX8 Vertex Shaders, Pixel Shaders and Point Sprites, DOT3 and Environment Mapped Bump Mapping, support for Full Scene Anti-aliasing and Texture Compression and two game tests using Ipion real-time physics.

Higher numbers denote better performance.

3DMark2001SE Benchmark Results with AF
	Video Card	FPS	Ranking
1.	Gigabyte FX5950 Ultra 2x AF	16365
2.	Gigabyte FX5950 Ultra 4x AF	15240
3.	Gigabyte FX5950 Ultra 8x AF	14509

Anisotropic filtering, or AF, is a technique used to supplement traditional bi-linear or tri-linear filtering (the process of blending the colours of adjacent pixels in a textured 3D image so that said image does not appear 'blocky' when viewed close up) on slanted 3D surfaces. Since Bilinear and trilinear filtering use even patterns to sample colours, the effect they produce can be unconvincing and blurry on textured surfaces that are tilted in one direction or another, since they are not 'square' to the camera.

Anisotropic filtering solves this problem by deciding which pixels to sample colours from based on the tilt of the surface. Theoretically, this means that all textured surfaces should appear sharp, regardless of their orientation to the camera. It also uses a fair bit of GPU power to institute. ATI and Nvidia each have their own method of instituting AF, but both involve dynamically combining it with regular filtering methods. ATI based cards are currently capable of up to 16X AF, while Nvidia based cards including the FX5950 can manage 8X.

Anisotropic filtering is an area that ATI definitely has a hold on; the Radeon 9800 Pro handily beat all the stock Nvidia offerings in all 3Dmark 2001 tests, and ran more or less evenly with the FX5950 in the Quake 3 tests, a dramatically different story than the above Q3 benchmarks where Nvidia dominated. One positive sign though, is the performance of the GV-N595U when overclocked in these benchmarks. Overclocking gave the 5950 GPU a major performance boost over stock speeds in this set of tests, good enough to best the Radeon 9800 Pro at its own game.