Although it's a two year old game, Aquanox is a still widely
played game. It has been very popular among reviewers, mainly
because of its features:
• Full support of DirectX8
• Environmental effects like plankton, plants etc.
• Photorealistic materials, radiosity lighting, reflections,
rt-shadows etc.
• Impressive layered, multicolored, volumetric fog effects
• Full support for FSAA to increase visual quality
• Advanced physics engine
• DirectSound 3D, EAX, MP3
• Supports all current input devices and ForceFeedback
Since Ti4x00 series of cards support DirectX 8.1 you will have
no problems running Aquanox with all the eye candy enabled (and
there are plenty of settings that you can fiddle with). As you
can see both cards performed similarly. I was very surprised as
to how our AMD system ran against the P4 with higher clocks. We've
used FSAA (Full Scene Anti Aliasing) during our testing. At 800x600
and 1024x768 the Ti4200 did quite well, beating the P4 system
by 18 and 5 FPS respectively. And no it's not an anomaly, we ran
this particular benchmark twice. Despite low scores at 1280x1024
it still ran very smoothly. Enabling level 2 of FSAA we are still
getting acceptable frame rates with smooth animations. Things
change while we switch to 4X FSAA (not that we didn't expect that).
An acceptable performance at 800x600 resolution will give you
around 45 FPS. Beyond that it gets pretty choppy, so we don't
recommend using this mode.
So what are the ultimate settings? Well first of all you have
to find out the resolution you like (for me it was 1024x768).
Then you should really go into game options and play with the
settings. In our example we set the details to maxiumum with trilnear
filtering. Then we applied different IQ modes. 2X FSAA gave us
what we wanted. Again if you like to play at higher resolutions
(1280x1024) you should really play around with the game settings.
