3DMark03 used to reveal the disposition between the Radeon 9800-, 9700-, 9600-, 9500-series and the GeForce FX-series graphics cards in terms of performance: while being somewhat more feature-rich than competitors, nVidia's GeForce FX products fell tangibly under the Radeon 9xxx in terms of performance.

Today 3DMark05 outlines us some other important trends:

• Shader Model 3.0 and Shader Model 2.0b are gaining strong momentum in terms of performance improvements for titles with complex pixel and vertex shaders
• Today's graphics cards will not be able to run long-term future games, including those that make vigorous use of Shader Model 2.0b/3.0 with sufficient framerate
• There is a clear need for more than 128MB frame-buffer on powerful graphics cards even today

The 3DMark05 itself delivered exceptional eye candy in all of its game tests. Highly-polygonal models along with massive amount of shader effects definitely bring the graphics bar to the next level. Some would argue that the world has not seen many 3DMark03-like games in reality, but on that there is only one answer: progress cannot be stopped.