Update: We have been informed by Alexander Jorias of Massive Development, that the article outlined below was published without authorization from Massive Development and is based upon an old preview build of Aquamark 3. Please keep that in mind when you browse through that article! Chinese website GZEasy has previewed the upcoming Aquamark 3 (homepage) DirectX 9 benchmark from german Massive Development. This comes at the price of signing an NDA, so don't expect a download anywhere until the official release. Unfortunately our own interview with Massive that we had negotiated with Massive Development back in April was never returned to us for publishing. To summarize things Aquamark 3 really looks promising. The benchmark based of the self developed KRASS engine is capable to fully scale with DirectX 7, 8 and 9 display adapters. KRASS was used to render the retail games Aquanox 1 and 2. In contrast to 3DMark 03, Aquamark shows an ongoing render sequence with 'scenes' in which several effects are tested. Read more... On true DirectX 9 hardware Aquamark uses Pixel Shader 2.0 and Vertex Shader 2.0, while on certain hardware it can fallback to Pixel Shader 1.4 (ATI). GZEasy also reveals that Massive Development is working on some sort of online comparison tool similar to Futuremark's Online Result Browser (ORB). Interestingly GZEasy has been granted to post a couple of screenshots, while page 2 of the preview mostly covers the details that were already released in the second technical document on Aquamark 3 released by Massive in June. Aquamark 3 allows you to control full screen anti aliasing options as well as texture filtering, VSync and triple buffering. Intel users might find it interesting that the benchmark seems to include at least a detection routine for Hyper-Threading, if not even some optimizations. We have to wait for the release to check back on this though. Page 3 covers the different 'scenes' of the render sequence and the effects used therein. You can check out the article, translated by Babelfish, here.