Asus Extreme N6600GT x 2 - Revisiting SLI
Aquamark 3
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 Aquamark 3 |
Aquamark 3 comes to us by way of game developer Massive Development. Massive's release of the original Aquanox in 1999 was ill received by the gaming community, but it was one of the first games of its day to implement DX8-class shaders. This 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, utilizes 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 aniso enabled concurrently. |
The Asus N6600 GT had very little trouble with the Aquamark 3 benchmark, especially running in SLI mode. In this test, a pair of GeForce 6600 GTs running in SLI mode are able to outpace the single-GeForce 6800 GT and Radeon X800 XL in every test configuration, the 6800 GT SLI rig, was the top-dog though - as it should be.
By adding the second GeForce 6600 GT to the equation, performance at 1024x768 increased by over 20% without anti-aliasing an anisotropic filtering, and by over 47% with AA and aniso enabled. In the same test configurations at 1600x1200, the performance increases were even larger; 51.1% and 92.4% to be exact.
