Highend CPU's vs High End Graphics cards

Articles & Guides 58 Page 5 of 9 Published by

teaser

Aquamark 3

AquaMark 3
The latest graphics cards on the market are all DirectX9 compatible these days, and we also see an increasing number of games utilizing the new DX9 features. To be able
am3-tease.jpg to see how well a graphics cards is performing in this new challenging DirectX 9 environment, AquaMark was developed.

The AquaMark3 benchmark delivers scores for specific hardware components as well as an overall score for the entire system. AquaMark3 is highly qualified to meet the needs of gamers because it's as close as possible to a typical game application. The AquaMark benchmarking series is based directly on the huge code and data base of the AquaNox games and the underlying krass game engine."

In the past we have used AquaMark 2.3 in our benchmark suite and although still a reputable application, Massive figured it was time for the next best thing. This is AquaMark 3, a benchmark that will utilize some of the finest DirectX 9 capabilities like Pixel and Vertex Shaders 2.0, and yet is by far not as Shader dependant as, for example, Half-Life 2 is. You will notice this in the overall results later in this article.

AquaMark 3, however, is not solely a DirectX9 benchmark; if you are working with a DirectX 8 or 7 compatible graphics card, you will still be able to use it just with a lot of graphical features missing. Make no mistake, AquaMark3 is a DirectX 9 benchmark. But since it's based on a real game engine it has fallbacks to DirectX 8 and even DirectX 7 that makes this software not a 100% DX9 benchmark.

Download: Aquamark 3 (63 MB)

 

AquaMark 3 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
x800Pro 54 51 47 41
x800Pro 3800+ 64 60 53 46
6800GT 61 59 55 50
6800GT 3800+ 72 68 62 54
x800XT 54 53 50 47
x800XT 3800+ 67 64 59 53
6800U 63 61 58 53
6800U 3800+ 75 71 66 59

Again we can observe tremendous performance shifts when the graphics card is running on a faster system. And again things change towards ATI's side when we enable a few IQ settings like 4xAA and 8x AF:

AquaMark 3 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
6800GT 54 48 39 31
6800GT 3800+ 60 51 40 32
6800U 57 51 42 34
6800U 3800+ 64 56 44 35
x800Pro 50 46 40 34
x800Pro @ 3800+ 58 52 45 37
x800XT 53 45 44 38
x800XT @ 3800+ 63 58 50 43

Aah, the Radeon x800 series show their sheer power. They are just so efficient with their image quality settings. Although in most cases the Radeon series are a bit faster with IQ then NVIDIA we can only see this huge difference with Aquamark 3 though. going back to CPU scaling, again we see that the XT needs to most hefty processor. but when it has just that .. it shows off it's power alright.

Copyright 2003 - Guru3D.com

Share this content
Twitter Facebook Reddit WhatsApp Email Print