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.

1024x768 (below) - 9800 XT 412/365

1024x768 (below) - 9800 XT 470/400

1280x1024 (below) - 9800 pro 380/350

1280x1024 (below) - 9800 XT 412/365

1280x1024 (below) - 9800 XT 470/400

1600x1200 (below) - 9800 pro 380/350

1600x1200 (below) - 9800 XT 412/365

1600x1200 (below) - 9800 XT 470/400

 

Well the results speak for themselves, the overclocked 9800 XT is quite clearly rendering many more frames at every resolution. Taking for example there is around a 30fps differential in the per pixel directional light shader from 9800 pro - 9800 XT @ 470/400. All cards perform exceptionally well in this test. The Nvidia cards ive tested with Shadermark 2.0 perform considerably slower than the ATI counterparts.

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