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| Performance Comparisons With Aquamark 3 |
| DX8 and DX9 Shaders |
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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, with 4x AA, with 4X AA and 8X anisotropic filtering and lastly with 4X AA and 16X aniso. |
It looks like we were in for a little turnabout in the benching when we got to Aquamark 3. While we have seen the X800 Pro mostly fall into line behind the GeForce 6800, in Aquamark 3 we've got the X800 Pro winning a lot of the battles, especially when Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were enabled. At first, the 6800 GT took a sizeable lead at each resolution, with the 6800 and X800 Pro performing at similar levels. Once we enabled 4X AA, the NVIDIA 6800s took a noticeable hit, while the X800 Pro kept churing out frames without batting an eyelash. Furthermore, when AF was enabled in the control panel, the X800 Pro really shined, usually losing less than a frame in either of the tests. At it's most significant margin, the difference between the 6800GT and Sapphire X800 Pro reached just over 6 frames per second, a delta of about 24% in Sapphire's favor.
