ASUS V9999 Gamer Edition - GeForce 6800
Aquamark 3
 |
|
 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, 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, with 4x AA, with 4X AA and 8X anisotropic filtering, and lastly with 4X AA and 16X aniso. |
The ASUS V9999 looked good with AquaMark 3, hitting the highest No AA scores of the bunch, while giving the X800 Pro a run for its money in the 4X anti-aliasing test. Once Anisotropic Filtering was introduced, we saw the typical NVIDIA slide, although the V9999, with its added horsepower, stayed within 9-10 FPS of the HIS X800 at both resolutions. The stock 6800 lagged behind the X800 Pro by closer to 10-15 FPS, where the FX5900XT was pretty well out-paced all around.
