Testbed and Methods

Since the new graphics card works across the PCI Express interface, and we’ve got almost the full range of cards for that platform, we are going to use our PCI Express testbed only. It is configured as follows:

• Intel Pentium 4 560 CPU (Socket 775, 3.60GHz, 1MB L2 cache);
• Intel Desktop Board D925XCV;
• 2x512MB Micron Technology PC2-4300 (533MHz) DDR2 SDRAM;
• Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C HDD (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card.

The following system software is installed on the testbed:

• Microsoft Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c;
• ATI Catalyst 4.12 beta; Catalyst 8.08 for the RADEON X850 XT PE;
• NVIDIA ForceWare 66.93.

And here’s the list of our benchmarks:

First Person 3D Shooters:

• Call of Duty: United Offensive;
• Doom 3;
• Unreal Tournament 2004;
• Halo: Combat Evolved;
• Far Cry;
• Painkiller;
• Half-Life 2;

Third Person 3D Shooters:

• Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow;
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time;
• Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne.

Simulators:

• IL-2 Sturmovik: Aces in the Sky;
• Lock On;
• Colin McRae Rally 04.

Strategy:

• Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour;
• Perimeter.

Semi-synthetic Benchmarks:

• Aquamark3.

Synthetic Benchmarks:

• Futuremark 3DMark03 build 350;
• Futuremark 3DMark05 build 110.

It is the first time that we use Valve’s recently released masterpiece Half-Life 2 as well as Futuremark’s new benchmarking suite 3DMark05. Then, we have also replaced the online Call of Duty shooter with its improved version called Call of Duty: United Offensive. The new version has better graphics and additional dainties in the gameplay; particularly, you can now control tanks other armoured vehicles of World War II.

We selected the maximum possible graphics quality settings in each application – the same for cards on GPUs from ATI and NVIDIA (we disabled the Anisotropic mip sample optimization for NVIDIA’s GPUs). We won’t perform theoretical tests since the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition is in fact just a faster version of the RADEON X800 XT, so such tests won’t have anything new to say to us.

We are sorry to say that we didn’t have a PCI Express 16x version of the GeForce 6800 Ultra at our disposal during the tests (its market availability might be better, by the way), and we had to take a GeForce 6800 GT as a representative of the opposite camp to compare ATI’s new graphics card with. Of course, this is no fair play at all, because the GeForce 6800 GT resides one tier lower in the market and costs $150 less. Just keep this fact in mind when reading the test results.