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Graphics Cards with a Recommended Price of $399
Getting down the price stairs we meet the GeForce 6800 GT and the RADEON X800 Pro, evaluated at $399 by the manufacturing companies. The GeForce 6800 GT seems preferable between the two due to its 16 pipelines and a performance that is only slightly below the level of NVIDIA’s topmost product. However, there is one more dilemma here as well: in a number of games when we enable anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing the leading position gets taken by the ATI RADEON X800 PRO, mostly due to efficient pixel shader algorithms and high-quality implementation of anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing techniques.
Besides that, many of such cards are likely to be operational at the frequencies of the GeForce 6800 Ultra, so the GeForce 6800 GT looks like the optimal choice for users who don’t want to spend $400 and more for a graphics card.
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So, the GeForce 6800 GT is your card if you’re willing to have a highest performance in games and support of Shader Model 3.0 at a discount.
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If silence, compactness, power-saving are notions that matter much to you, or if you’re a real hardware enthusiast, consider the RADEON X800 Pro . Modders should be interested in this product since it can be converted into a RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition with a bit of skill and luck. In this case you’ll get a nice performance boost. ATI’s R420 chip yield is very high and some of fully operational dies go to produce 12-pipeline cards. This is the ground for the conversion, although you should approach the problem soberly and not risk it if you don’t feel confident as to the outcome.
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Besides the possibility of turning it into a faster product, the RADEON X800 Pro offers effective anisotropic filtering and full-screen anti-aliasing algorithms, which often help it to surpass the GeForce 6800 GT in tests. However, this is still not enough for us to say that this GPU from ATI is overall better than its rival.
