Aquamark3: Accurate Benchmarking for Old and New (DirectX9) Apps?

No Shadows With V45.23

(Frame 4250) The image shown here is compressed and therefore somewhat misleading. Click on the image in order to get an lossless PNG image.

NVIDIA's v45.23 does not render shadows of moving objects as you can see very clearly in this comparison. You can also see the missing lighting in v51.75 on the ship.

Anisotropic Filtering Quality

For a better identification of the differences in the following comparisons, we recommend to set the desktop resolution to 1024x768-32.

Settings: 1024x768-32 without FSAA and with 8x anisotropic filtering

(Frame 3600) The image shown here is compressed and therefore somewhat misleading. Click on the image in order to get an lossless PNG image.

NVIDIA's v43.03 and v45.23 offer better quality than ATI's Catalyst v3.4 and 3.7 in this situation - in the upper part of the image - but v51.75 shows a major loss in quality. Regarding the low quality of the ATI drivers, we assume that triangles of the terrain are in a unfavorable angle for ATI's adaptive filtering technology.

The following Macromedia Flash animation shows the difference in a better way:

(Macromedia Flash needed)