X-bit labs

ATI RADEON X700 XT: Gaming Performance Preview (page 4)

Category: Video

by Anton Shilov , Alexey Stepin

[ 09/21/2004 | 07:31 AM ]

Testbed and Methods

We were fortunate to test the RADEON X700 XT across a number of games we usually employ for benchmarking purposes, and can offer you the complete picture of its performance. Alas, we couldn’t do the same with the RADEON X700 PRO and RADEON X700 due to the limited time we got to test the sample. Of course, we are going to fill this blank as soon as we get the graphics cards into our own test labs. Right now, you are invited to view the test results for the RADEON X700 XT graphics card in comparison with the GeForce 6600 GT and RADEON 9800 XT. We measured the speeds of the RADEON X700 XT and the GeForce 6800 GT on the following testbed:

• Intel Pentium 4 560 CPU (Socket 775, 3.60GHz, 1MB L2 cache);
• Intel Desktop Board D925CXC;
• 1GB DDR2 PC2-4300 (533MHz) SDRAM (Micron Technology, 2x512MB);
• Samsung SpinPoint SP0812C HDD (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card;
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0c;
• ATI CATALYST 8.06.4-040911à, NVIDIA ForceWare 65.76.

Due to the tight timeframe we decided to cooperate with our friends from ComputerBase.de (thanks to them!), who kindly shared with us some test results they got on a testbed identical to ours, but with a 3.40GHz CPU.

The RADEON X800 PRO and the RADEON 9800 XT were tested on our AGP platform:

• Athlon 64 3400+ CPU (2.20GHz, 1MB L1 cache);
• ASUS K8V Deluxe mainboard;
• OCZ PC-3200 Platinum EB DDR SDRAM (2x512MB, CL2.5-3-2-8);
• Seagate 7200.7 HDD (SerialATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card;
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0ñ;
• ATI CATALYST 4.8, NVIDIA ForceWare 65.76 (60.85 for 3DMark03).

To avoid confusing you, the cards tested on the AGP platform are marked with the asterix sign (*) throughout this review. We used the following games and benchmarks:

• Call of Duty
• Doom III
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• Halo
• Far Cry
• Painkiller
• Prince of Persia
• Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness
• Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
• Aquamark 3
• 3DMark03

Yes, the list is rather short as our ordinary test sessions go, but again – we had too little time to test the new graphics card more extensively. Each game was set up for the maximum possible graphics quality so that the settings were the same for ATI and NVIDIA cards. We enabled Trilinear optimization and Anisotropic filtering optimizations for the NVIDIA graphics cards.

We selected the Low optimizations settings in the Catalyst AI driver, which correspond to the typical optimizations of ATI’s Catalyst.