Performance in Strategy Games

Age of Empires 3

The PowerColor X800 GTO 16 looks well in the “pure speed” mode and is just brilliant at the “eye candy” settings. In the former case it is no slower than the GeForce 6800 GS and in the latter case it gains an overwhelming victory. This performance doesn’t seem so spectacular, though, when you recall that the new graphics card from PowerColor does not support Shader Model 3.0 and does not provide as high image quality as the GeForce 6800 GS does. Well anyway, you get an acceptable frame rate in 1024x768 resolution only.

Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War

The higher GPU frequency and the support of UltraShadow II technology put the GeForce 6800 GS on top in this test, but the PowerColor X800 GTO 16 does well, too, making all the resolutions playable in the “pure speed” mode. In the “eye candy” mode the speed of the PowerColor may bottom out to below 25fps, yet its average performance is rather high, at least for 1024x768.