Aquamark 3
- Author: Massive
- DirectX Class: 9.0
- Pixel and Vertex Shaders: Yes (mixed mode, PS1.4 and PS2.0)
My favourite DX9 benchmark, it's slick and easy to run on your own hardware. It's a mixed mode test, running the full gamut of possible PS versions afforded to developers by DX9. Given that, ATI's GPU beats the quickest commercial NVIDIA GPU by a fair margin. No close call here, just a spanking for the Aeolus by the ASUS. Ouch.
Without delving into too much detail, it seems like the shader register count penalty, oft blamed for poor DX9 performance on NVIDIA hardware, is responsible for the poor performance showing here. 52.16 also exhibits what I think is a shader precision bug on one of the individual tests, but in general it looks correct.
While the Aeolus isn't slow, in games based on the engine used in Aquamark 3 a high end Radeon 9800 will show it who's boss. Remember in Aquamark 3, final score is a function of average framerate, simply multiplied by 1000. Scale the graph units accordingly to get a frames per second figure.
