The HIS X700 Pro IceQ Turbo VIVO 256MB PCIe Video Card
Performance Comparisons With Aquamark 3
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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 followed by 4X AA and 8X anisotropic filtering. |
Once again, the advantage of the 8 Pixel pipelines and fast memory can be seen with the X700 Pro. Here, the card was the best overall performer by a wide margin. At the 1024x768 resolution, the X700 Pro maintained a 15 FPS lead over the X600 XT with no AA enabled. That lead dropped slightly at 1600x1200, narrowing to 13 FPS. Once we enabled AA and Anisotropic Filtering, the X700 Pro really shined, surpassing the performance of the X600 XT, and others, with no AA enabled.
