Asus Extreme N6600GT x 2 - Revisiting SLI

Name: Asus Extreme N6600GT x 2 - Revisiting SLI - Page 6
Brand: Asus

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, April 19, 2005, 03:00 PM EDT

Performance Comparisons With Aquamark 3

DX8 & DX9 Shaders

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.

Tags: Asus, sli, Xtreme, extreme, revisit, GT, XT, ting, eme

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