ASUS Extreme AX600XT vs. MSI PCX 5750: Budget PCI-Express

Name: ASUS Extreme AX600XT vs. MSI PCX 5750: Budget PCI-Express - Page 8
Brand: ASUS

by Jeff Bouton — Tuesday, September 28, 2004, 07:00 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. Because 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, uses not only DirectX 9-class shaders, but DirectX 8 and DirectX 7, as well. We ran this benchmark at resolutions of 1,024 x 768 and 1,600 x 1,200 with no anti-aliasing and with 4X AA and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled together.

The AquaMark 3 scores continued to favor the ASUS X600XT as with the other tests. The X600's superior fill rate, memory bandwidth, and shader performance helped propell it way ahead of the MSI GeForce PCX 5750 in this test, especially at the higher resolution when AA and Aniso were used. At 1,600 x 1,200 with 4XAA and 8X Aniso enabled, for example, the X600 was a full 51% faster than the 5750.