AquaMark is a relatively new DirectX 9 benchmark, and although it does not correspond to an actual game, it does use the same Krass engine as found in products such as Aquanox 2 and Spellforce. AquaMark 3 also supports new features such as Hyper-Threading, Pixel Shader and Vertex Shader 2.0, and uses a wide range of DirectX 9 effects and features. For this review, we've tested the Overall performance benchmark in standard 1024x768 32-bit mode.
AquaMark 3 is a very demanding DirectX 9 benchmark that uses all facets of a computer system, and although the scores are usually close, relative ranking is the most important factor. This is another benchmark that seems to favor the Northwood over the Prescott, and the Pentium 4-3.4E falls just behind the 3.4C in AquaMark 3. AMD doesn't fare much better, and although we're talking a nominal gap, the Athlon 64 3400+ is slightly behind the Pentium 4-3.4E as well.
The AquaMark 3 CPU performance benchmark has been added to our suite, as it gives us yet another view of the AquaMark performance matrix. Even though the System scores did have the Pentium 4-3.4E Prescott behind the corresponding Northwood score, it is still surprising to see the CPU performance rankings in the same order.
GunMetal is another DirectX 9 benchmark test, and uses the basic game engine (think Manga-based armor) to really stress a gaming PC. This is another very rough test that uses 2X AA as default, so don't be surprised at the relatively low framerate scores.
The GunMetal benchmark test is extremely video card-limited, and as such, really doesn't show a noticeable gap between the various processors. This is a different kind of video game test, and it demonstrates that a faster CPU doesn't always equate to higher performance.
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