Page 10 - 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 able 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 something new. This is AquaMark 3, a benchmark that will utilize some of the finest DirectX 9 capabilities like Pixel and Vertex Shaders 2.0. Yet it is by far not as Shader dependent as Half-Life 2 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)

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 graphics card is capable of. That's really nice to see for a reasonable priced product.

Things will change when we turn on 4x Antialiasing and 8x Anisotropic Filtering (AA and AF from now on). The numbers in red represent the results of the card when overclocked.