Performance - AquaMark

AquaMark 2.3One 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.

 

I can hear you say wow already. Extreme efficiency with AF. GFFX will allow you to enable this feature in any game at 8x easily. Let's move on towards AA.

Funnily enough Scewed Grid mode AA seems to work more properly in this benchmark. Again, you'll probably never use a higher AA setting than 4x so performance is really good.