Testbed and Methods

For our today’s test session with PowerColor X800 GTO 16 we used the following test platform:

• AMD Athlon 64 4000+ CPU (2.40GHz, 1MB L2);
• Asus A8N-SLI Premium mainboard (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI);
• OCZ PC-3200 Platinum EL DDR SDRAM (2x1GB, CL2-3-2-5);
• Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C HDD (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card;
• Enermax Liberty 620W PSU (ELT620AWT, nominal power - 620W);
• Dell P1130/Dell P1110 monitors (21”, 1800x1440x75Hz maximum resolution);
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0c;
• ATI CATALYST 6.1;
• NVIDIA ForceWare 81.98.

ATI and Nvidia drivers were configured with standard settings that we usually use for testing in our lab:

ATI Catalyst:

• Catalyst A.I.: Standard
• Mipmap Detail Level: Quality
• Wait for vertical refresh: Always off
• Adaptive antialiasing: Off
• Temporal antialiasing: Off
• Quality AF: Off
• Other settings: default

Nvidia ForceWare:

• Image Settings: Quality
• Vertical sync: Off
• Trilinear optimization: On
• Anisotropic mip filter optimization: Off
• Anisotropic sample optimization: On
• Gamma correct antialiasing: On
• Transparency antialiasing: Off
• Other settings: default

Each game was set for the maximum graphics quality similar to ATI Technologies and Nvidia solutions, except Pacific Fighters flight simulator that requires vertex texturing support for work in SM3.0 mode. We didn’t change the configuration files of the test games. We only used the settings options that were offered by the gaming engine. If the game offered integrated benchmarks and allowed recoding and playing back demos and saving the performance data in a file, we would use this feature, if not – we would resort to Fraps utility. We took not only the average performance rates but also the minimal values, if the circumstances allowed that.

If the games allowed managing the full-screen anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering we would set FSAA 4x + AF 16x mode with the help of corresponding settings. If there was no possibility to configure the system like that, we would force this mode from the graphics card drivers. If the gaming engine didn’t support FSAA, we didn’t run the tests in eye candy mode at all. Since PowerColor X800 GTO 16 didn’t have any overclocking potential to play with, we decided not to run the tests for the overclocked graphics card, because the small increase in the GPU and memory frequency like that would hardly affect the gaming performance at all.

We did not include the results for Radeon X800 XL: the thing is that Radeon X800 XL and PowerColor X800 GTO 16 run at the same performance level. In fact, it is not surprising at all, because the technical specifications of these cards are similar. Besides PowerColor X800 GTO 16 there were the following testing participants in our today’s race:

• Radeon X800 GTO (R430, 400/980MHz, 12pp, 6vp, 256-bit, 256MB)
• Radeon X1600 XT (RV530, 590/1380Mhz, 12pp, 5vp, 128-bit, 256MB)
• GeForce 6800 GS (NV42, 425/1000MHz, 12pp, 5vp, 256-bit, 256MB)
• GeForce 6800 (NV42, 325/600MHz, 12pp, 5vp, 256-bit, 128MB)

We tested our graphics cards in the following games:

First-person 3D Shooters :

• Battlefield 2
• Chronicles of Riddick
• Call of Duty 2
• Doom III
• Far Cry
• F.E.A.R.
• Half-Life 2
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
• Project Snowblind
• Quake 4
• Serious Sam 2
• Unreal Tournament 2004

Third-person 3D Shooters :

• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Simulators :

• Colin McRae Rally 2005
• Pacific Fighters

Strategies :

• Age of Empires 3
• Warhammer 40.000: Dawn of War

Semi-synthetic benchmarks:

• Aquamark3
• Final Fantasy XI Official Benchmark 3

Synthetic benchmarks :

• Futuremark 3DMark03 build 360
• Futuremark 3DMark05 build 120
• Futuremark 3DMark06 build 120