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One upcoming game promising an "underwater nightmare" and heavily relying on DX8 effects is Aquamark from the Aquanox game (Fishtank.de). Even though the game is mostly limited by the graphics card, it also requires a huge amount of raw CPU or rather FPU power. At 1280 x 1024 x 32 bpp, benchmarks were a wash between all CPUs but what about lower resolutions?

Aquamark 1024 x 768 x 32bpp

At 1024 x 768 x 32 bpp (pixel shaders enabled), the Athlon XP takes a clear lead.

Aquamark 640 x 480 x 16 bpp

At low resolution and color depth floating point power rules and the Athlon pretty much outclasses the P4 regardless of shape and variety.

Caligari TrueSpace 4.2 PublicBench

This professional CAD benchmark consists of an animated walk through a gallery with different lighting effects and motions and is extremely optimized for SSE instructions. In our review of the 845D chipset, we had quite a few problems with this benchmark and the i845D, however, with the latest nVidia drivers things are looking much better. Needless to say that either Northwood plain and simply outclasses the Willamette. The XP2000+ delivers a nose-to-nose finish with the 2.2GHz Northwood.

Developed for Intel to show the benefits of the PIII's SSE instructions, TrueSpace 4.2 PublicBench is a benchmark that literally killed any AMD CPU until SSE was enabled with the palomino core. Suffice it to say that the P4 so far did not like this benchmark too much except when running on the SIS 645 chipset.

Once again, the Athlon XP2000+ takes all trophies but the important thing is really the performance delta between the Willamette and the Northwood which finally appears to wake up.

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