ATI Radeon X800 XL Review

Name: ATI Radeon X800 XL Review - Page 7
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, December 15, 2004, 08:01 AM 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 wasn't very well received by the gaming community, but it was one of the first games 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 Aquamark 3 tests also put X800 XL in a favorable light. In this these tests, the Radeon X800 XL was again able to best NVIDIA's flagship GeForce 6800 Ultra in a couple of configurations. At 1024x768, the Radeon X800 XL lagged just a couple of frames per second behind the 6800 Ultra when no anti-aliasing or ansio was used, only to pull ahead of the Ultra slightly once they were enabled. The X800 XL beat the 6800 GT in both test configurations at the lower resolution. With Aquamark set to run at a resolution of 1600x1200, the X800 XL again lost to the 6800 Ultra, but this time by about 10%, when no AA or aniso filtering was used. It pulled ahead of the Ultra again when anti-aliasing and aniso was enabled, however, and by a margin of roughly 12%.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, ATI Radeon, review, view, IE, X8

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