X-bit labs

PowerColor X850 XT and PowerColor X800XL Graphics Cards Review (page 7)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

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

Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters

Doom III

Our tests have proved it repeatedly that Doom III runs best on graphics cards with NVIDIAGeForce 6 GPUs due to ideal OpenGL driver and special technologies for fast drawing of Z/Stencil shadows. The same was once again proven today: the overclocked PowerColor X850 XT managed to reach just the level of the far more widely spread GeForce 6800. The faster NVIDIA GeForce 6800 graphics cards are unrivalled by their competitors based on RADEON from ATI Technologies in this game.

There’s a different situation with enabled anisotropic filtering and full-screen anti-aliasing: the GeForce 6800 and GeForce 6600 GT SLI are losing their ground (the latter is greatly impeded by the small amount of graphics memory) due to the much higher load on the graphics subsystem, and the cards from PowerColor look much better than they did in the “pure speed” mode. For example, the PowerColor X850 XT is no worse than the GeForce 6600 GT SLI and, at the increased frequencies, almost overtakes the GeForce 6800 GT. The PowerColor X800 XL is quite successfully competing with the GeForce 6800.

In this deathmatch scene the limiting influence of the central processor is less noticeable than in single player mode, so both graphics cards from PowerColor produce playable frame rates in all the resolutions. But again, cards on NVIDIA GeForce 6 chips are still maintaining the lead.

When the “eye candy” mode is activated, graphics cards on GPUs from ATI Technologies almost match their NVIDIA counterparts. The PowerColor X800 XL looks good against the 6800, while the overclocked PowerColor X850 XT is as fast as the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra.