X-bit labs

ASUS V9999 Gamer Edition Graphics Card Review (page 15)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 10/19/2004 | 12:41 PM ]

Lock On

Lock On is rather a hard game, although there are few pixel shaders in it. This time the ASUS V9999 Gamer Edition has a weighty advantage over the RADEON X800 PRO, mostly due to the architecture rather than to the memory speed, since there’s no difference between the ASUS and the original GeForce 6800, and overclocking is of little effect. We should note a certain waywardness of the game as it doesn’t allow setting itself up similarly for different platforms – see the results of the GeForce 6600 GT tested on a platform with a Pentium 4 560 and a PCI Express bus.

It’s all vice versa in the eye candy mode where the RADEON X800 PRO comes ahead due to the traditional reason – an efficient operation of its graphics memory. The availability of 16 pixel pipelines is important for this mode, too, as the results of the GeForce 6800 GT suggest – it is closely following the RADEON X800 PRO.

Colin McRae Rally 04

A higher pixel shader processing speed helps the RADEON X800 PRO to become the leader in this shaders-heavy auto simulator, but the ASUS V9999 Gamer Edition gets really close to it in high resolutions – the gap is only 9fps in 1600x1200, while the absolute speeds are higher than 100fps.

FSAA and anisotropic filtering enabled, the RADEON X800 PRO is superior (ATI Technologies’ exclusive techniques for an efficient use of the available memory bandwidth help a lot in the eye candy mode, as usual). Anyway, the ASUS turns in a nice result, especially at overclocking. This suggests that the game is sensitive to the speed of execution of pixel shaders, which depends directly on the GPU clock rate.