eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition

Name: eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition - Page 7
Brand: eVGA

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, August 11, 2004, 06:00 PM EDT

Performance Comparisons With Aquamark 3

DX8 and DX9 Shaders

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. Since 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 1024x768 and 1600x1200 with no anti-aliasing, with 4x AA, and with 4X AA and 16X aniso enabled concurrently.

Our results in the Aquamark 3 benchmark somewhat mirror what we saw with Unreal Tournament 2004. In this test, the eVGA card was fastest at 1024x768 when no anti-aliasing and 4X AA was enabled, but the Radeon X800 XT took the lead when AA and Aniso were enabled together. At 1600x1200, the scales tipped slightly more in favor of the Radeon X800 XT, where it was able to score victories in the 4X AA test by a small margin, and again in the 4X AA + 16X Aniso test by about 10.5%.

Tags: GeForce, evga, VGA, Xtreme, extreme, edition, Ultra, Extreme Edition, force, XT, 680, ULT, 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