RoyBatty wrote:

I can't find 3d winbench 98 or 99 anywhere, does anyone have working download links for them?

Thanks.

I don't know if 3d Winbench is an accurate gauge of how fast a graphic card will perform in real world conditions. Tom's Hardware Guide says that the results can be too easily cheated by drivers that optimize for the specific benchmark program. The drivers that they give to reviewers to get the best benchmark scores usually aren't the same ones that are made available to the general public.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/3d-winbench-98,57.html

Is there a version of FRAPS or something similar that works with older games and video cards? Actually seeing your framerate while you're playing is a better indicator of how powerful your card is than any synthetic benchmark.

If a benchmark was popular, it was optimized for at some point. Those optimizations can range from just bug fixes to tricks to avoid rendering parts of the scene. So yeah only games are really useful.

But games can be tweaked too. See ATI's Quake / Quack stuff. NVIDIA was also replacing shader programs with lower quality versions back in the GeForce FX days. The companies still do this today but it's more transparent than it has been in the past.

3D WinBench has some nice things and the old benchmark scenes are interesting. For one it has a very nice test suite to test the various features for functionality.

I have 3DWinbench 2000 at home. I'm not sure if I still have the older versions but I will look.