Shader Performance
In this DX8 test, the cards' scores are almost identical, although the Radeon 9800 PRO ekes out a slim lead.
It is unclear whether the NVIDIA cards run this test in PS1.4 mode, which they also support in hardware, or if they revert to the slower PS1.1. The latter would explain their comparatively bad performance. When this benchmark was originally released, ATi's cards were the only ones capable of supporting the PS1.4 version. A PS1.1 version was therefore implemented for all other cards, with the drawback that it needs more passes to render and is consequently slower.
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