Conclusion, Continued
Finally, there are also some things lacking in AquaMark 3. We would like to see the online tool AquaMark3-Result-Comparator become less complicated to use. A top list showing the best Triscore numbers on the front page would offer more incentive to be in the Top 10. The opportunities to write comments about the different scores would also be very nice.
A bit trickier to manage is the cheating issue. Many freaks tweak their card to the max by using lower LOD settings and other registry hacks to lower the quality of the rendered image and increase the score. People who are not aware of those tricks wonder why their own scores are so low compared to the top scores, even if they use a similar system.
Other things on the wish list include improved AUTT (automated testing) and shader watermarks to detect modified shaders used by the drivers. Since AM3 uses a real world game engine, it's fine to optimize the shaders because we know that a graphics processor can perform better when the layout of the shader better fits to its architecture, but since AM3 is a benchmark, it should be up to Massive to verify those changes and make sure that it renders the same results.
Other features on our wish list are improvements in the ASGRA screenshot function so screenshots can be captured from the special features tools with maybe an autogamma option - with test pixels - to ensure the same brightness of the shots on different cards.
We will use AquaMark 3 for future reviews since it allows us to test certain features of the cards. The special features included in the software allow us to a certain extent to detect invalid driver optimizations - as this article clearly proves.
As mentioned before, it's not the Holy Grail of benchmarks. But it's a very useful source of information. For the end user, it's a very neat toy and worth the money you would spend on buying a license to take advantage of the special features. And if Massive implements a few additional tools on the homepage, it will be even more attractive for benchmark freaks. In the end, people want to swank with their scores...
