ATi Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition

Name: ATi Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition - Page 9
Brand: ATi

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, December 01, 2004, 08:00 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 antialiasing and with 4x AA and 8X aniso enabled concurrently.

Looking at the graphs above, you'd think NVIDIA stopped paying attention to this benchmark. Just like we saw in the Tomb Raider: AOD test, the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition was able to beat all of the other cards we tested in the Aquamark 3 benchmark, at both resolutions, regardless of the test configuration. At 1,024 x 768 the X850 XT PE outperformed the GeForce 6800 Ultra by about 2% - 8%. In the higher-resolution tests, though, the new Radeon was able to increase its lead significantly. At 1,600 x 1,200, the X850 was as much as 33.1% faster than NVIDIA's flagship GeForce 6800 Ultra.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, edition, ATI Radeon, XT, platinum, PLA, 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