"It's Thursday, the 12th of January and right now I'm on a train traveling to Amsterdam where ATI will hold a press-briefing on their upcoming R580 release. Good stuff. Yesterday however, the English site Hexus posted some results/score on NVIDIA's and ATI's latest and to be released flagship graphics cards. I mention this because the only thing the small news-bit mentions performance wise is yet again the 3DMark05 number. How come that whenever we see a 3DMark score we immediately know exactly how fast the product will be? It's almost scary how much people can rely on a number and that's exactly the success of the 3Dmark series, that single number.

It's simply perfect, the number represents something we can comprehend; scaling. Just like we scale the number in GHz for processors, if you ask a user with a low knowledge level do you think 2 GHz is fast he'll go "hmmm." If you ask him that same question yet with 3.6 GHz in the question he'll go "aah." You can see there is a certain danger to a single number, for example an AMD 64 FX-57 running at 2.8 GHz is much faster then a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 processor."