CodeCreatures is a synthetic 3D benchmark that is a good reference for VGA performance comparison. This is a high-end 3D benchmark that also requires DirectX 8 hardware, making a good tool for measuring the potential of DirectX 8 game performance.

The Codecreatures benchmark is written with Microsoft's DirectX 8.1 API and incorporates the use of Vertex and PixelShaders popular on next generation 3D accelerators.

The benchmark plays a photo-realistic nature scene and calculates the performance of the graphics adapter by measuring the fps that it can display at 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions.

-Codecreatures number

The codecreatures number is the resulting score of the total benchmarking process and is basically the geometric mean of the three frame rates multiplied by 100.

The use of nVidia's PixelShader Model 3.0 greatly improves the performance of these cards. This test uses Vertex and PixelShaders and the CineFX engine makes its appearance, producing more realistic scenes. The total Codecreatures score of 8851 is more than enough. Even with highly demanding games, the owners of these cards will laugh at others, playing at lower resolutions.