Sapphire Radeon X850 Pro 256MB PCI Express

Performance Comparisons With Aquamark 3

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 followed by 4X AA and 8X anisotropic filtering.

We continued to see the same performance trend, with the Sapphire X850 Pro having an edge over the X800 Turbo.  The margins were broader at 1024x768, with the differences hovering in the 6 FPS range while 1600x1200 scores narrowed to 4 FPS.


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