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ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition

Nvidia GeForce 6800 killer?

If you've read this far, you're probably wondering when I'm going to talk about performance. Well, there is one thing that's true for both the Radeon X800 XT and the GeForce 6800 Ultra: you're going to have a very tough time finding a CPU fast enough to make the most of these cards.

To say that ATI and Nvidia have taken graphics to the next level with their latest chipsets is an understatement of epic proportions. ATI claims that the Radeon X800 XT is twice as fast as the Radeon 9800XT, which is a pretty amazing performance jump by anyone's standards. The only problem is that running a Radeon X800 XT in almost any PC available today, means that your graphics performance is limited by the speed of the CPU and not by the ability of the graphics card.

We tested the X800 XT using a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 'Northwood' chip and using a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 'Prescott' processor, both with HyperThreading. The former represents the average home system, where someone might want to upgrade their graphics card to get a bit more games performance. The latter represents a reasonably high-end system, but not a super-powerful setup where money is no object.

The 2.6GHz machine is exactly the same system that we used to test the Nvidia GeForce 6800 Ultra, so some of the scores are directly comparable. I say some of the scores because we only had the 6800 Ultra for a short while, so we could only run a limited number of tests.

Looking at 3DMark 2001 SE the X800 XT beats the 6800 Ultra at 1024 x 768 with no full-screen anti-aliasing (FSAA) or anisotropic filtering (AF). Pushing things up to 1280 x 1024 with 4x FSAA and 4x AF saw the 6800 Ultra edge ahead, while at 1600 x 1200 with the same features on, the X800 XT came out on top.

X800 XT vs 6800 Ultra - 3DMark 01

X800 XT vs 6800 Ultra - 3DMark 03

However, running AquaMark3 the 6800 Ultra managed to stay ahead of the X800 XT until we pushed things up to 1600 x 1200 with 4x FSAA and 4x AF, where the ATI card nosed ahead by a couple of frames per second.

X800 XT vs 6800 Ultra - AquaMark

Using Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness, at 1024 x 768, the 6800 Ultra again edged ahead, but only by 2fps. While running X2: The Threat the numbers are equally close.

X800 XT vs 6800 Ultra - Tomb Raider 4

Next page: Verdict

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