AquaMark 3 - Preview

Benchmarks results... we wouldn't serve our name very well if we didn't do an extensive test with several graphics cards and published some numbers for you. What we did was this, we took several DirectX 9 based graphics cards and tested them on the same machine the past two days.

The cards used were Radeon 9600 (256 MB), Radeon 9600 Pro (128 MB), Radeon 9700 Pro, Radeon 9800 Pro, Geforce FX 5600 Ultra, and GeForce FX 5900 Ultra.

The system used was based on an Intel Spingdale 865PE based platform with PAT enabled. The CPU was a 2800 MHz class C Pentium 4 (800 Mhz FSB) with hyper-threading enabled and 1 Gigabyte of DDR 400 memory. We mixed the drivers, that mean you'll notice results for both ATI's Catalyst 3.6 and 3.7. For the NVIDIA based cards we used the current official 45.23 WHQL drivers and the new (for selected reviewers released) Beta 51.75 drivers.

Small comment: normally we use reference drivers only. The past few days there has been so much controversy regarding the half-life 2 benchmark that we decided to include the beta driver (51.75) results also. This is an exception, we just want to show you where NVIDIA is heading with these drivers. Even with the new VS/PS optimization there's no way these driver can boost HL-2 performance enough to even come close to radeon 9800 Pro, they definitely show potential though. Last word is that an official 51.xx driver set will be released at the end of this month.

First let's have a look at RAW performance, no Anisotropic filtering is enabled here, and Anti Aliasing has been disabled.

As you can see the names look a bit funny. The numbers behind them represent the driver used. Without Anisotropic filtering and AA enabled here the results are in favor for NVIDIA in the high-end range. This will change when we enable some IQ settings though.

It's obvious that the mighty Radeon series have the overall performance edge here, especially the mid-range dominates. The results as demonstrated here on both cards have Anti Aliasing at 4x and Anisotropic Filtering at 8x enabled. What interesting times 3D technology wise are ahead of us.

In the future we'll also do some further testing on other systems. From what we understand the benchmark software is a bit CPU dependant. We did as much as we could with the time given to us.