| Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9700 Pro |
One of my favorite benchmarks is
AquaMark
based upon the Krass engine that the upcoming title Aquanox serves.
2666 Five years after the
gigantic battle of mankind against a mysterious bio-robotic species called " the
Bionts" the world of Aqua is put to its hardest test.
Very strange things happen while Emerald Flint, a mercenary coming from the
anarchistic "Tornado Zone", is trying to find out about the secrets of an
extremely dangerous gang of pirates, the "Crawlers". And Flint never works
without his four wingpilots! A latent civil war reigns in Neopolis, the capital
of the Atlantic Federation. The armed forces, which are supporting certain
putschists, have built a scientific station off Atacama City, that they call "Brainfire".
The military experiment goes wrong and triggers off a cascade of serious
incidents. Seaquakes shake the whole globe. Huge godlike monsters are creeping
from out of their prison where they have been captured for thousands of years.
They want to take revenge on mankind. The Crawlers are in league with the
rebelling armed forces and Flint loses his best friend through his own fault. A
whirl of fear, violence and chaos slowly pulls the heroes into the middle of the
pulsating heart of evil.
Before we start benchmarking let's take a look at this nifty piece of software that we will use for DirectX8 and higher compatible videocard product-reviews.
With the benchmark program AquaMark you are able to test the effectivity of the video card of the user's computer under real world conditions. This means, that AquaMark is not a common demo-benchmark. It contains a fully working game engine. The first published version of AquaMark (2.1) is based on krass™ engine, that serves also for 3D-realtime-rendering. AquaMark 1.0 and 2.0 were non-public versions. AquaMark has been optimized to compare DX8 on different video cards and supports all necessary features such as f.e. vertexshader or pixelshader etc.
| AquaMark | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 |
| Ati Radeon 9000 Pro | 43.1 | 37.9 | 27.1 | 19.9 |
| GeForce3 Ti 200 | 50 | 38.6 | 27.8 | 23.6 |
| Hercules Radeon 8500 128 MB | 44.6 | 42.4 | 35.9 | 26.6 |
| 3D Blaster Ti 500 | 60.5 | 50.4 | 36.6 | 27.6 |
| Gigabyte Radeon 8500 128 | 43.9 | 41.9 | 37.4 | 28.8 |
| GeForce4 Ti 4200 64MB | 58.8 | 46.8 | 31.8 | 24.1 |
| Aopen GeForce4 Ti 4200 | 58 | 43.6 | 30.4 | 23.3 |
| XFX GeForce4 Ti 4200 | 56.4 | 45.4 | 31.6 | 24.3 |
| Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4400 | 61.6 | 49.5 | 34.3 | 26.3 |
| Albatron GeForce4 Ti 4600 | 63 | 53.1 | 36.9 | 28.7 |
| ATI Radeon 9700 Pro | 67.1 | 63.2 | 56.1 | 42.9 |
| 3D Prophet 9700 Pro | 68.3 | 64.4 | 57.9 | 45.8 |
| Sapphire 9700 Pro | 68.3 | 65 | 58.1 | 45.9 |
Aquamark is a very good benchmark to test graphics cards, it utilizes the videocard probably better than any test software available.
The difference between GeForce4 Ti 4600 and a Radeon 9700 Pro is about 25% Let's take a look at the performance drop with features like FSAA and Anisotropic filtering enabled.| AquaMark FSAA | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 |
| default | 68.3 | 64.4 | 57.9 | 45.8 |
| 2x | 66.8 | 61.5 | 47.4 | 37.6 |
| 4x | 65.2 | 56 | 39.6 | 29.7 |
| 6x | 62.3 | 47.2 | 32.9 | 24.8 |
| AquaMark Anisotropic | 800x600 | 1024x768 | 1280x1024 | 1600x1200 |
| disabled | 68.3 | 64.4 | 57.9 | 45.8 |
| 2x | 65.2 | 59.6 | 46.6 | 34.2 |
| 4x | 63 | 55.8 | 40.8 | 29.6 |
| 8x | 61.9 | 53.7 | 38.6 | 27.9 |
| 16x | 61.5 | 53 | 38 | 27.3 |
| 16x + 6x fsaa | 49.5 | 35.3 | 24 | 17.8 |
The Radeon 9700 Pro manages these features superb, why ? You are not looking at real world performance here, this benchmark was designed to get everything out of the graphics card. The actual game runs at much faster framerates. So this is just an indication on how the videocard behaves in the most extreme conditions. If the card was able to sweat it would ;)
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