MSI RX800: Radeon X800 XT (PCI Express)
Aquamark 3
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 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.
