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Performance Comparisons
With Aquamark 3 |
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DX8
and DX9 Shader Ops |
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Aquamark
3
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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, with 4X AA and 8X
anisotropic filtering and lastly with 4X AA and 16X
aniso. |
From this point forward, you'll
notice quite a few "N/A"s listed in our graphs associated
with the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. The GeForce 6800 Ultra
and Radeon 9800 XT both have a "16X" anisotropic setting
available, but the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra maxes out at 8X.
Due to this limitation, the 5950 Ultra could not run the 16X
aniso tests, thus the "N/A"s.
In Aquamark 3, regardless of
the resolution, or levels of AA and aniso used, the GeForce
FX 6800 Ultra outran the competition. It was between
23% and 42% faster than the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, and 28%
to 38% faster than the 9800 XT at 1024x768. At
1600x1200 the GeForce 6800 Ultra's massive fillrate and
improved shader performance help
extend its leads over the 5950 Ultra and 9800 XT by 43% to
63%, and by 47% to 55%, respectively.
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Benchmarks
With
Halo |
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Halo
- All Patched & Ready To Go! |
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Halo
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For
many gamers, the release of Halo marked the end of a
long wait, since it was originally released as an Xbox
exclusive a few years back. No additional patches
or tweaks are needed to benchmark with Halo, as Gearbox
has included all of the necessary information in their
README file. The Halo benchmark runs through four
of the cut-scenes from the game, after which the average
frame rate is recorded. We patched the game using
the latest v1.04 patch and ran this benchmark twice,
once at 1024x768 and then again at 1280x1024.
Anti-aliasing doesn't work properly with Halo at
the moment, so all of the test below were run with
anti-aliasing disabled. |
The GeForce 6800 Ultra
significantly outperformed the competition in the Halo
benchmark. With their new Catalyst v4.4 drivers, ATi
still maintains a lead over the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra, but
the 6800 Ultra simply crushed them both. At 1024x768
the 6800 Ultra was 50% faster then the 9800 XT and 57%
faster than the 5950 Ultra. Bump the resolution up to
1280x1024 and the 6800 Ultra's advantage over the 9800 XT
jumps to 77%, and its lead over the 5950 Ultra increases to
over 90%.
Unreal Tournament
2004 & Splinter Cell
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