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3DMark 03 Professional Edition
3DMark 05 Business Edition
3DMark 06 Business Edition
Literally millions and millions benchmark results have been submitted to Futuremarks Online ResultBrowser database. It has become a point of great prestige to be the holder of the highest 3DMark score. A compelling, easy-to-use interface has made 3DMark very popular among game enthusiasts. Futuremarks latest benchmark series, 3DMark03 up-to 3Dmark06, continues this tradition by providing a Microsoft DirectX 9 benchmark.

The introduction of DirectX 9 and new hardware shader technologies puts a lot of power in the hands of game developers. Increasingly realistic 3D games will be available over the next year and a half. The use of 3D graphics will become more accessible to other applications areas and even operating systems.

Let's have a look at 3DMark 03, 05 and 06 scores.

Very respectable performance for all cards with obviously the 7900 GT on top, and I like things on top. ;) 3DMark is designed in a way that excludes the CPU in the score calculation and tries to focus purely on DX9 graphics card performance. The higher the score the better the card performs.

Let's focus at 3DMark06 a bit more in-depth.

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.

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, 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.

Download: Aquamark 3 (63 MB)

All cards dominate here as the AquaMark 3 engine is getting considerably outdated. Let's enable some IQ settings and see if we can stress the cards a bit more as that is looking silly.

Above you are looking at the results with 4xAA and 8xAF enabled where the cards scale a lot better. It's way better to test this way and to look at performance IQ wise as we'd get CPU bound. Again these are good numbers.