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

9800 pro (click for full image)

FX (click for full image)

9800 XT (click for full image)

In the above benchmark due to it being a late addition we have used a 5900 non Ultra 128mb card, not the 5900 Ultra 256mb used in the other benchmarks. Had we used an Ultra the results would have been a little closer however the XT would have still been well in the lead over the FX.