Asus AX800 XT (Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition)
Aquamark 3
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 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.
