Aquanox Benchmarks (1/2) |
The German game developer Massive drew a great deal of attention to itself during the early stages of NVIDIA's GeForce 3 launch with its game Aquanox. NVIDIA had announced a developer contest of sorts, which called on developers to create demos and benchmarks to show off the GF3's capabilities. Of course, the main requirement for these programs was that they should utilize the chip's pixel and vertex shaders. Massive entered the fray with its own benchmark, AquaMark, facing competition in the form of Ballistics, Dronez and X-Isle, among others. The game engine of the final retail version of Aquanox differs from AquaMark's in some respects, though. For example, there are no longer any options to change the settings for vertex and pixel shaders. When asked about this, Massive replied that the AquaMark engine is completely identical to the one used in Aquanox and uses DirectX 8 to its full extent. Considering the state of the Krass engine (yes, that's what Massive's 3D engine is called) at the time, I find this claim rather questionable. The following benchmarks show how current video cards perform in the actual retail version of the game (v1.17). There is a save game available at 3D Center which I used as the base for a time demo run. As in Max Payne, the final scores have to be recorded manually by reading them from the screen at the end of the time demo. Since this method is obviously not as exact as getting a final score or framerate reported, inaccuracies of +/- 0.2 frames are possible.
Pictures from the benchmark sequence. The fire causes the framerate to sink dramatic. Screenshots taken on a Ti500 at 800x600-32 with 2 x FSAA. The cards:
The ATi RADEON suffered from rendering problems both in Win98 and WinXP:
There are currently beta drivers available on the web which fix these problems. But be warned: these are not official drivers and as such are not supported by ATi. Test systems:
Benchmarks - Level: Magellan The Pentium 4 benchmarks were run both in Windows 98SE (red) and Windows XP Professional (green). Since no real differences are to be expected, the Athlon tests (blue) were run only in Windows 98.
800x600-32: Thanks to their higher clock speed, the GeForce 3 cards grab the lead. The RADEON 8500 is close on the heels of the Ti500, though. The performance differences of the ATi cards in Win98SE and WinXP are interesting. The GeForce 2 cards show no such phenomenon, offering nearly identical performance in both operating systems across the board. The RADEON 7500 follows at a respectable distance, trailed by the RADEON 7200 (the graphics card formerly known as RADEON DDR 64MB ViVo). The GF2 MX barely makes the magical 25fps barrier, but the Kyro II is already on its knees, crawling along at 20fps. We can safely say that the game is playable on neither of these two cards even at this resolution. |
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Copyright: 17.01.2002 - RIVA Station 2002 - Lars Weinand URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/aquanox_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-) |
By
Lars Weinand - Editor In Chief RIVA Station / Editor Tomīs Hardware Guide
