Asus AX800 XT (Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition)

Name: Asus AX800 XT (Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition) - Page 7
Brand: Asus

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, August 17, 2004, 01:00 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, and with 4X AA and 16X aniso enabled concurrently.

It's tough to declare the best overall performer in the Aquamark 3 benchmark. At 1024x768, the AX800 XT fell behind the GeForce 6800s when anti-aliasing was disabled, but with 4X AA and again with 4X AA and 16X aniso, the AX800 XT basically tied the 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition, where both cards finished within 1 frame per second of the other. Raising the resolution to 1600x1200, somewhat tipped the scales in favor of the AX800 XT, however. At 1600x1200, the 6800 Ultras were fastest when no anti-aliasing was applied, but with 4X the AX800 XT pulled slightly ahead of the GeForces, and with 4XAA and 16X aniso enabled together the AX800 XT was a full 14.4% faster than the fastest GeForce.

Tags: Asus, ATI, Radeon, edition, XT, platinum, PLA, 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