Volcano Level

“Volcano” is a yet another perfect example of what “long” pixel shaders can bring: multitude light sources clearly impact performance negatively on the hardware that cannot optimize rendering process, while the RADEON X800 and the GeForce 6800 graphics chips families clearly deliver tasty performance advantage thanks to more efficient programming.

Note: minimal fps are marked with white numbers on the diagrams, black numbers represent average fps.

With about 14% performance improvement over Shader Model 2.0 rendering path, ATI Technologies’ RADEON X800 XT leads on the “Volcano” level compared to NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 Ultra. Nevertheless, the same cannot be said about the RADEON X800 PRO that is still outperformed by the GeForce 6800 GT.