Sapphire 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 enabled and with 4X AA and 8X aniso enabled concurrently. |
The performance scales tipped in favor of the GeForce 6800 GT when testing with Aquamark 3. This time around, the 6800 GT bested the X800 XTs in every test configuration but one. When tested at 1024x768, the 6800 GT beat the X800 XTs, with and without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, by a decent margin. With the resolution increased to 1600x1200, the 6800 GT bested the X800 XT in the default test, however, the X800 XTs pulled ahead by about 10% once 4X anti-aliasing and 8X aniso was enabled at the higher resolution.
