X-bit labs

Clash of the Titans: ATI RADEON X800 PRO and ATI RADEON X800 XT Against the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra

Category: Video

by Tim Tscheblockov , Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 05/04/2004 | 07:16 AM ]

Today ATI Technologies announced new RADEON X800 (R420) architecture and RADEON X800 XT and RADEON X800 PRO video processors. In this article we are going to test them against their primary rival, NV40 from NVIDIA in 25 contemporary gaming benchmarks. Find out who the winner is!

Table of contents:

• New Games: Closer Look
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• 3D First-Person Shooters
  
• RTCW: Enemy Territory
  
• Call of Duty
  
• Unreal Tournament 2003
  
• Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo
  
• Halo: Combat Evolved
  
• Tron 2.0
  
• Highly Anticipated DX9 Game
  
• Highly Anticipated DX9 Game 2
  
• FarCry
  
• Firestarter
  
• Painkiller
  
• Third-Person 3D Shooters and Arcades
  
• Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow
  
• Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness
  
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
  
• Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne
  
• Star Wars: Knights of The Old Repubilc
  
• Simulators
  
• IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles
  
• Lock On
  
• X2: The Treat
  
• F1 Challenge 99-2002
  
• Colin McRae Rally 04
  
• 3D Real-Time Strategy Games
  
• C&C Generals: Zero Hour
  
• Semi-Synthetic Game Tests
  
• Final Fantasy XI Official Benchmark 2
  
• Aquamark3
  
• Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Futuremark 3DMark03 build 340
  
• Conclusion
  

Today ATI Technologies announced new RADEON X800 architecture and RADEON X800 XT and RADEON X800 PRO video processors, having added the last missing element to the picture of the 3D graphics market for the coming summer.

The peculiarities and features of the new RADEON X800 have been already discussed in the previous article called ATI RADEON X800: R420 Totally Exposed. And now we are going to take a closer look at the performance of the today’s fastest graphics solutions: ATI RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition, ATI RADEON X800 PRO, ATI RADEON 9800 XT, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra in the whole bunch of gaming benchmarks.

As always, we believe that it is impossible to build a complete vision of the graphics card potential without the benchmarks in the majority of contemporary games. If you are a gamer, you will definitely agree with us. And this is absolutely true: the major application field for the contemporary 3D graphics accelerators installed in home systems is gaming.

We did our best to make the investigation of the testing participants’ gaming performance as adequate as possible keeping in mind the current situation in the market. Alongside with the games we have been using for a long time now, we would also like to introduce a few new ones, which will be included into the set of our benchmarks from now on. They are: 3D shooter called Painkiller, Stealth-action Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow , RPG Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic and autosimulator aka Colin McRae Rally 04.

Let me say a few words about each of these new games.