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 it 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 pixels resolutions.

The difference between the 6800s starts at 0.8 fps at the lowest resolution dropping down to 0.5 at the mid resolution and finally vanishes at 1600x1200. The X600XT couldn't do any better than run the benchmark at 50fps lower than the other two cards.

-Codecreatures number

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

The Codecreatures number represents exactly what we saw in the game tests. You would hardly spot the difference in the chart if it wasn't for the number written above each bar.