X-bit labs

PowerColor X850 XT and PowerColor X800XL Graphics Cards Review (page 12)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 03/29/2005 | 09:39 AM ]

Half-Life 2

The problem with NVIDIA’s PCI Express hardware shows up in Half-Life 2, too. In 1600x1200, however, we can see that the PowerColor X800 XL has almost the same frame rate as the much more expensive GeForce 6800 Ultra.

Our turning on full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering doesn’t change the situation in this test. There’s water on this map, and ATI’s cards are better at drawing water in this game.

The d3_c17_12 map once again proves that this game is ATI’s domain: all cards with ATI’s GPUs have excellent speeds here, outperforming considerably even the fastest representatives of the NVIDIA camp. It’s only in 1600x1200 that the performance of the PowerColor X800 XL sinks to the level of the GeForce 6800 Ultra.

The PowerColor X850 XT leaves the GeForce 6800 Ultra behind in the “eye candy” mode, too. The PowerColor X800 XL also shows its best, once again outperforming the more expensive competitor from NVIDIA. Once again, you should keep in mind the above-mentioned problem with the performance of NVIDIA’s PCI Express graphics cards when analyzing the results of Half-Life 2.