Performance - Aquamark 3

AquaMark 3The latest graphics cards on the market are almost 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 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 and yet is by far not as Shader dependant as Half-Life 2 is, for example. You will notice that in the overall results later in this article.

AquaMark 3 is not solely a DirectX 9 benchmark though. 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, so this software is not a 100% DX9 benchmark.

Download: Aquamark 3 (63 MB)

Right, let's throw in some other graphics cards also. Let's have a look how she behaves with IQ settings enabled.

Again really nice numbers. The XT is the fastest thing available in the highest resolution, the Pro doing awesome numbers as well.