Currently there is no DirectX 9.0 HLSL pixel shader benchmark on the market. Futuremark's 3DMark03 (www.futuremark.com) and Massive's AquaMark 3.0 (www.aquamark.com) are bases on hand written assembler shaders or partly HLSL shaders. HLSL is the future of shader development! The HLSL shader compiler and its different profiles have to be tested and this gap fills ShaderMark v2.0. Driver cheating is also an issue. With ShaderMark, it is easily possible to change the underlying HLSL shader code (registered version only) which makes it impossible to “optimize” a driver for a certain shader, instead of the whole shader pipeline. The ANTI-DETECT-MODE provides and easy way for non-HLSL programmers to test if special “optimisations” are in the drivers

9600 XT results (please click for full size image)

9600 pro results (please click for full size image)

Again the Pro results are lagging behind the XT due to the enhanced core.