Date:
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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ATI Radeon X800XL Preview

We evaluate the $300 ATI Radeon X800XL video card finding what kind of gaming experience it will provide for you on a PCI-Express platform. We compare it to the X800Pro, 6800OC, and 6800GT.

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System Test Setup:

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (nForce4), AMD Athlon 64 FX-55, 2 x 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LLPro TwinX Dual Channel DDR400 Cas2, Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150, Windows XP Professional SP2 with DirectX 9.0c.

and

ABIT AV8 (VIA K8T800), AMD Athlon 64 FX-55, 2 X 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LLPro TwinX Dual Channel DDR400 Cas2, Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150, Windows XP Professional SP2 with DirectX 9.0c.

For our system platform setups we ended up having to use two different motherboards to get the data we needed, one an AGP platform and the other a PCI-Express platform. Between both the CPU, memory and OS setup was the same. We are using a very fast Athlon 64 FX-55 CPU to help reduce CPU bottlenecks that we have seen in some games.

We tested the Radeon X800XL PCI-E video card and the GeForce 6800GT PCI-Express video cards on the ASUS A8N-SLI nForce4 platform. We tested the Radeon X800Pro AGP and BFGTech GeForce 6800OC on the ABIT AV8 K8T800 platform, again the CPU, memory and OS setup were the exact same between the two.

Video Card Test Setup:

Reference ATI Radeon X800XL 256MB PCI-E

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Our card of focus today we used a reference ATI Radeon X800XL video card provided by ATI on the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe nForce4 platform in PCI-Express x16 operating at default clock speeds 400MHz / 1GHz using beta Catalyst 4.12 (8.08). We tested with the default driver properties except for disabling VSYNC.

Reference ATI Radeon X800Pro 256MB AGP

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For comparison we are using a reference ATI Radeon X800Pro AGP8X card on the ABIT AV8 platform operating at default clock speeds 475MHz / 900MHz. We are using the same beta Catalyst 4.12 (8.08) drivers with the default properties except for disabling VSYNC.

Reference NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT 256MB PCI-E

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For comparison we are using a reference NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT PCI-Express x16 video card at default clock speeds 350MHz / 1GHz. We are using the latest beta ForceWare drivers as found on NZone 67.03. We are using the default driver properties which means Trilinear Optimization was ON, Anisotropic mip filter optimization was OFF and Anisotropic sample Optimization was ON except we did disable VSYNC.

BFGTech GeForce 6800OC 128MB AGP

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For comparison we are using a retail BFGTech GeForce 6800OC AGP video card at default clock speeds 350MHz / 700MHz. We are using the latest beta ForceWare drivers as found on NZone 67.03. We are using the default driver properties which means Trilinear Optimization was ON, Anisotropic mip filter optimization was OFF and Anisotropic sample Optimization was ON except we did disable VSYNC.

Game Evaluation Setup

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit different from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. Gameplay includes performance and image quality evaluation. We have two sections, “Highest Playable” and “Apples to Apples”. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. Following the Highest Playable section we have a brief Apples to Apples performance section for those that find benefit of framerates with matching IQ. We use a high performance system, with a very fast CPU in order to remove CPU bottlenecking.

For easy navigation, each game tested is on its own page which can be selected from the navigation menu at the bottom right of each page. You can also click straight to each section from here.