Asus AX800 Pro (Radeon X800 Pro)

Name: Asus AX800 Pro (Radeon X800 Pro) - Page 7
Brand: Asus

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, June 30, 2004, 10:30 PM EDT

Performance Comparisons With Aquamark 3

DX8 and DX9 Shaders

Aquamark 3

Aquamark 3 comes to us by way of Massive Development. Massive's release of the original Aquanox in 1999 wasn't very well received by the gaming community, but it was one of the first games to implement DX8 class shaders, which led to the creation of Aquamark 2 - a benchmark previously used by many analysts. Since the Aquamark benchmarks are based on an actual game engine, they must support old and new video cards alike. Thus, the latest version of Aquamark, Aquamark 3, utilizes not only DirectX 9 class shaders, but DirectX 8 and DirectX 7 as well. We ran this benchmark at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1600x1200 with no anti-aliasing, with 4x AA, with 4X AA and 8X anisotropic filtering and lastly with 4X AA and 16X aniso.

The lead changed hands a few times with the Aquamark 3 benchmark. Without any anti-aliasing (the least important of the results), the GeForce 6800 GTs had a clear advantage over all of the other cards. Enabling 4X AA, levels the playing field a bit and the AX800 Pro gains some ground, but the GTs still posted the best scores. When we enabled Anisotropic filtering as well, however, the scales tipped in favor of the AX800 Pro/TD. At 1024x768, the AX800 Pro and GT's performed at virtually the same level, but at 1600x1200 AX800 Pro was the fastest card by at least 12%.

Tags: Asus, Radeon, pro, X8

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com