CodeCreatures is a synthetic 3D benchmark that is a good reference for VGA performance comparison. This is a high-end 3D benchmark that also requires DirectX 8 hardware, making a good tool for measuring the potential of DirectX 8 game performance.

The Codecreatures benchmark is written with Microsoft's DirectX 8.1 API and incorporates the use of Vertex and PixelShaders popular on next generation 3D accelerators.

The benchmark plays a photo-realistic nature scene and calculates the performance of the graphics adapter by measuring the fps that it can display at 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions.

As the tests continued, the behaviour of these cards under high GPU load becomes clearer. It looks like the driver device chooses not to push the cards to their limits, if there is no need to. This is why we get small performance differences at lower resolutions. As resolutions get higher, all other cards report lower framerates, while the two 7800GTX maintain high framerates. In fact, there is no difference in framerate for the twin 7800GTX cards regardless of resolution.

-Codecreatures number

The codecreatures number is the resulting score of the total benchmarking process and is basically the geometric mean of the three frame rates multiplied by 100.

The Codecreature number is the best way to observe the differences in performance, and as expected, the AOpen 7800GTX SLI had no rival.