Direct X8 games such as Aquanox do breathe a fresh lease on life into the T&L games of 2000, which for the most part looked rather similar. This game is certainly proof of what NVIDIA is trying to tout the GeForce3 and DX8 to be. The German designers from Massive Entertainment went and pulled out all the stops with all sorts of pixel-popping eye candy.

Lighting effects, bump mapping shadows... the full monty. It even makes particular use of the multiple (4) texture stages available with GeForce3. And it does look awesome but as we found out, with everything turned on, it really does stress the current champ, the Geforce2 Ultra, too much. Under 10fps for a card like the Geforce2 Ultra is something that anyone who has had this card for any length of time will be unaccustomed too. It's really down to the hard-wired T&L of the Geforce2 chip (the ATI Radeon did not run this test), which unfortunately seems to stunt any chance of a decent frame rate. If indeed more games come out like this which make use of the programmable T&L features of a DX8 fully-featured GeForce3 card, then this story will likely continue and that $500 investment only a few months ago will start to look about as smart as buying internet stocks in October of last year.

Enter the Geforce 3... So with its programmable T&L and QUINCUNX turned on, the game looked breathtaking but was a bit slowly paced at 24fps. Turning QUINCUNX full scene anti-aliasing off did make the nasty jaggies come back but one could gain a few extra fps as it ran a little faster at 35fps. Turning the resolution down a notch did of course put a little less overall stress on the Geforce3. An interessting note that the GeForce3 actually performed slightly better with the pixel shader turned on - perhaps whatever effects Massive is using to simulate the look of the pixel shader when it is not engaged are a bit harder on the overhead.

And speaking of image quality, the GeForce3was run with the Pixel Shader option turned on, improving image quality even more. The Geforce2 was obviously not able to run in this mode. Alongside 3Dmark 2001, this kind of benchmark is what NVIDIA would obviously like to see more of but as we all know only too well, it takes time for the games industry to actually catch up and make full use of the technology. Maybe when they do, NVIDIA might be releasing NV25 and/or 30?