Page 14 - 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 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)
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 5700 Ultra is capable of. That's really nice to see for a 199 USD product.
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 |
| 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 |
| NV36 541/1.02 | 29 | 22 | 16 | 12 |
| NV38 525/1.02 | 43 | 35 | 26 | 20 |
First if we look at the 5950 we can make note of the fact that a Radeon 9800 Pro already can beat it with an interesting margin. The 5700 however again impresses me. Up pulls ahead of the Radeon 9600 Pro. The numbers you see in red are the results with overclocking enabled. NV36 is of course the 5700 Ultra and the NV38 of course the 5950 Ultra.
