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AquaMark 3
The latest graphics cards on the market are all DirectX 9 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. 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, for example, Half-Life 2 is. You will notice this 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 that makes this software not a 100% DX9 benchmark.
A bit more diversity is shown here to show the complexity of different CPU's and graphics cards settings. First off I wanted to show you (in the above graphics card) that SLI does work for sure, especially once you hit higher resolutions. L
et's look at the results with 4xAA and 8xAF enabled scaled over different platforms.
A major shift in performance, interesting
. Notice that with 4xAA and 8 levels of AF the SLI nForce Intel based system at 4 GHz still outperforms a Single 6800 0xAA - 0xAF on the AMD64 4000+ system. (check with the upper graph).