Creative Labs 3D Blaster 5 FX5900 Review

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Page 9 - AquaMark 3

AquaMark 3
The latest graphics cards on the market are almost all DirectX9 compatible these days, and we also see an increasing number of games utilizing the new DX9 features. To be ableam3-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 Half-Life is, for example. You will notice that 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 making this software not a 100% DX9 benchmark.

Download: Aquamark 3 (63 MB)

AquaMark 3 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
FX 5600 24 21 17 13
9600 256 29 23 17 13
9600 Pro 31 25 19 14
FX 5700 Ultra 41 35 27 21
9700 Pro 46 41 33 26
9800 Pro 49 45 38 30
5900 49 44 37 30
Blaster5 FX5900 49 44 37 30
9800 Pro 50 44 38 30
FX 5900 Ultra 52 48 41 34
FX 5950 Ultra 53 49 43 36

As you can see, pretty similar results compared to Splinter Cell. the NVIDIA series clearly have the edge here. Again look at that really nice performance the 5900 is capable of. That's really nice performance. Things will change when we turn on 4x Antialiasing and 8x Anisotropic Filtering (AA and AF from now on).

4xAA 8xAF 800x600 1024x768 1280x1024 1600x1200
FX 5600 16 13 9 7
9600 256 21 16 12 8
9600 Pro 24 18 13 9
FX 5700 Ultra 26 19 14 11
FX 5900 34 27 20 15
Blaster5 FX5900 34 27 20 15
443/788 38 30 22 17
9700 Pro 39 32 24 19
FX 5900 Ultra 39 31 23 17
FX 5950 Ultra 40 32 24 18
9800 Pro 43 36 27 21

The 5900 managing really well. The numbers you see in red are the results with overclocking enabled.

Copyright 2003 - Guru3D.com

Image Quality
A small addition to the AquaMark 3 benchmark numbers is an image quality test we'd like to show you. As a lot of you would like to compare and see the differences between Radeon Directx 9 and GeForce FX Directx 9 graphics cards. IQ test are very difficult and time-consuming to do. So I'm not commenting on what I think is better. You can capture a screenshot at a specific interval a hundred times but it'll never be 100% the same. The captures as you see them are close to each other though, very close.

So here's what we did and what you need to do. First, if you are on broadband, congratulations ! Are you on-dialup ? Go to the next page now. The images you can use for comparison have been saved as .PNG file to ensure maximum picture quality versus compression. This means that each image will be 1874 KB in size ! That's right, 1280x1024x32 2MB images !

Once you download them you should get some software like ACDSee. With your '+' and '-' keys you can zoom in and with 'Page Up'  and 'Page Down' quickly switch between the images instantly and check out the difference precisely.

Each image was taken at frame 4000 of the benchmark, each image is 12x10x32. We captured them in the order as show in the table below, you can click on the link to download the image.

BTW the recent findings that ATI renders the scenes worse than NVIDIA I'm not buying at all. Looks like some sort of gamma issue and there's nothing more to it then that.

GeForce FX 5900
Detonator 52.16
Radeon 9800 Pro
Catalyst 3.8
No AA - No AF No AA - No AF
4x AA - 8x AF 4x AA - 8x AF

each link you click will load up a 2Mb picture !
AA= Anti aliasing* - AF is Anisotropic Filtering**

Copyright 2003 - Guru3D.com

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