eVGA Personal Cinema FX5700
Test Setup / AquaMark 3 and Halo Benchmarking
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 Aquamark 3 |
Aquamark 3 comes to us by way of Massive Development. Massive's release of the original Aquanox in 1999 wasn't very well received by the gaming community, but it was one of the first games to implement DX8 class shaders, which led to the creation of Aquamark 2 - a benchmark previously used by many analysts. Since the Aquamark benchmarks are based on an actual game engine, they must support old and new video cards alike. Thus, the latest version of Aquamark, Aquamark 3, utilizes not only DirectX 9 class shaders, but DirectX 8 and DirectX 7 as well. We ran this benchmark at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1600x1200 with no anti-aliasing and then with 4x AA enabled. |
From the start, we can see that the Personal Cinema FX 5700 is probably not going to be a stellar performer. With AquaMark 3, neither it, nor the reference cards in its class, could break playable frame rates with max quality set in the drivers. Granted, with the quality settings turned down the scores will increase, but from a quality of image perspective, none of these cards are up to the task.
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 Halo |
For many gamers, the release of Halo marked the end of a long wait, since it was originally released as an Xbox exclusive a few years back. No additional patches or tweaks are needed to benchmark with Halo, as Gearbox has included all of the necessary information in their README file. The Halo benchmark runs through four of the cut-scenes from the game, after which the average frame rate is recorded. We patched the game using the v1.02 patch and ran this benchmark twice, once at 1024x768 and then again at 1280x1024. Anti-aliasing doesn't work properly with Halo at the moment, so all of the test below were run with anti-aliasing disabled. |
Again we found the frame rates less than ideal, with the Personal Cinema unable to break 30FPS at 1024x768. However, we will say that when we loaded the game and played it for a few moments, it did seem fine overall.
