MSI RX800: Radeon X800 XT (PCI Express)

Name: MSI RX800: Radeon X800 XT (PCI Express) - Page 7
Brand: MSI

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, November 23, 2004, 10:00 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 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.

Aquamark 3 proved to be somewhat of a strong point for the GeForce 6800 GT. When we tested with Aquamark with the resolution set to 1024x768, the GT outpaced the Radeon X800 XTs by about 10% when no anti-aliasing or aniso was used, but the Radeons came within striking distance when 4X AA and 8X anisotropic filtering were enabled. At 1600x1200, the GT again finished ahead of the Radeons with AA and aniso disabled. The X800 XTs were able to pull ahead of the GT by approximately 7%, however, once 4X AA and 8X aniso were enabled at the higher resolution.

Tags: MSI, Radeon, PC, Pre, MS, PCI Express, XP, pci, express, XT, 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