AquaMark3 allows PC users to easily measure and compare the performance of their current and next-generation PC systems. It provides a reliable benchmark which helps users to configure their systems for the best gaming performance.

The AquaMark3 executes a complete state-of-the-art game engine and generates 3D scenes designed to make the same demands on hardware as a modern game.
The utilized game engine, the krass™ Engine, has been used in Aquanox and AquaNox 2: Revelation as well
as in the upcoming RTS Spellforce
by Phenomic Game Development. It is accepted industrywide and well-known to deliver high-performance graphic effects with superior quality.

Technically, AquaMark3 utilizes recent hardware features of the new DirectX 9 API, such as PixelShader 2.0, while staying fully backward compatible to DirectX 8 and 7 graphics hardware. The graphics and game engine features activated can be configured in fine detail to allow the performance measurement to be adjusted appropriately for the target system.

To make the benchmark as easy to use as possible, AquaMark3 offers a great variety of standardized and used defineable evaluation schemes. Intuitive visual output formats help to easily compare results to each other.

Unlike synthetic benchmarks, AquaMark allows benchmarking in a real-world scenario, with an engine and art assets showing the complexity of current state-of-the-art games.


The AquaMark3 results are calculated on a single or multiple pass basis under predefined or customer-defined boundary conditions. A single pass consists of a series of scenes, where each scene is built around a specific subject typically found in games (like particles, plants, illumination, culling, physics etc.). Although every scene seems to be fully predefined (i.e. cutscene), no object follows predefined paths. The actions of the objects are entirely simulated in real-time using the artificial intelligence, the physics and the collision system of the engine.

While running the benchmark the visual environment of the spectator will change significantly. The benchmark map has been designed to encompass a broad variety of environments commonly available in current action games. Despite of the fact that the different scenes highlight certain visual or game play specific features, these effects never stand alone and are always embedded in the complex context of a fully featured game engine. This is a major difference compared to a synthetic benchmark focused on a stand-alone effect evaluation. AquaMark3 uses a simple but reliable simulation scheme. In the benchmark pass each simulation step alternates with one display step. After the simulation step is executed, the visual data gets extracted and a frame is displayed by the rendering engine. In an active game, controlled by the user, the game engine sometimes needs to drop frames or run the simulation step twice to synchronize the real-time input and output. Although this scheme is widely used in games, in a benchmark it would cause non reproducible results. Running to create a valid score, AquaMark3 will not drop frames. However the user will have the option to drop frames, thus running the benchmark in synchronized real-time mode with additional music. For the reasons mentioned above this mode generates no results at all.

The standard report generated by AquaMark3 allows an overall analysis of the single and multiple pass results. The analysis can be carried out on a pass-by-pass, a scene-by-scene and even a frame-by-frame basis. To ensure a faultless and comparable analysis, AquaMark3 creates different predefined and standardized files which can intuitively be used in the Microsoft(R) Excel Software Package.