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What we are looking for here with these final 2 benchmarks is similar results to the other 3 we've looked at so far. The games here rely on shader hardware on the GPU to run well but since we keep the graphics card constant across both systems, we can look at chipset level performance to a certain degree.
We'll look at Aquamark first. Based on Massive's underwater action simulation, Aquanox, Aquamark is a short but sweet look at a shader heavy benchmark. We can see if i845G's bandwidth deficiency denies the DFI some performance here as seen earlier.
A win for the DFI here in Aquamark, a somewhat unexpected result. The i845G despite only offering up 2.1GB/sec to the processor, manages to hold off a chipset offering a bandwidth hungry processor 600Mb/sec more bandwidth. Looking closely, the difference is minimal and in the real world, without the fps counter in front of you, you wouldn't pick the quicker machine. A nice showing that i845G does the job when used with an external graphics card.
A look at Comanche 4 to round off this page. Comanche 4 is massively shader heavy as we've mentioned. Can i845G spring another surprise here?
The graph is deceiving at first glance, take a closer look at the numbers and all becomes clear. Again, identical real world performance from both systems but with i845G taking the honours here yet again.
I make that all square so far with the DFI showing strong performance against the MSI. Onto some benchmarks that should stress the chipset and CPU a bit more.
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