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.

-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.

As has been mentioned in past reviews, the nVidia Pixel Shader provides a boost to cards using this feature. The first two cards, the Aopen 7800GTX and ASUS N7800, use the latest version of Pixel Shader, version 4.0. Great performance in this test, although again the ASUS graphics card seems to have the edge over our reviewed card. Still, the differences overall can be considered as negligible.