The Expendable Timedemo is, in our minds, the best real world Direct3D supporting benchmark available that offers 32-bit color support.

We also feel that Descent3, which we posses a special 32-bit color capable version of, is also quite good at measuring the performance of a video card under Direct3D. However we found that the MAXX had some anomalies at the driver level that ATi's engineers hadn't solved by the time of this article's writing. The results of the three cards we tested in the Expendable Timedemo are interesting. The raw fill-rate improvements and throughput that the MAXX offers are clearly represented at all resolutions. In fact, the disparity between the MAXX and its competitors, including the GeForce256, becomes larger as the resolutions scale upward.

It's worth noting that we ran the drivers that are included with the retail version of the Creative 3D Annihilator on CD in favor of the newer beta-only drivers that NVIDIA has made available recently. When the final version of the GeForce256's drivers eventually become available, and are 100% bug free, we'll revisit these exact tests and update the results.

One thing is clear from these early MAXX scores. It is the lesson that true, sustainable fill-rate pays dramatic performance dividends in today's game titles.