Since the majority of today's applications and games are compatible with DirectX 9, the need of benchmark applications that use DX 9 has been brought up. The benchmark uses the 3D engine (Krass engine) of the Aquanox game.

Aquamark Triscore

The Aquamark Triscore comprises 3 values: the overall system performance, the performance of the graphics system and the CPU performance. Keep in mind that this is not the total result of the tests, but the result of the whole benchmark process including all 9 chapters.

3DMark 2001

3DMark 2001 is the predecessor to 3DMark03. It's mainly a directx8.1 benchmark and the score depends a lot on the CPU power of your computer. However for reference use only we decided it'd be best to just leave it in our benchmark list so you can compare the next generation cards with the possibly outdated you have at home.

Several months ago, we showed the first SLI system with two 6600GT cards, getting 70948 Aquamarks and 17674 3DMarks respectively, and we asked ourselves: can it go any higher? The X850XT card managed to perform even better, with 21770 3DMarks. Now, the winner is nVidia again. 88127 Aquamarks and 29950 3DMarks are setting new gaming standards. The Aeolus cards are well beyond the competition and maybe they should be better compared against a single R520 or G70 based card.