X-bit labs

ATI RADEON X800 XL 512MB Graphics Card Review. 512MB: Today’s Need or Reserve for the Future? (page 16)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 05/05/2005 | 02:10 PM ]

Simulators

Il-2 Sturmovik: Aces in the Sky

This flight simulator defaults to using OpenGL, thus giving a certain advantage to NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT/Ultra cards. We have no profit from the 512MB of graphics memory in the “pure speed” mode here, just like in the rest of the games we used for this review.

The extra memory brings no speed bonuses in the “eye candy” mode, either, despite the enabled full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. The GeForce 6800 GT and 6800 Ultra are leaders still.

We faced a paradox in the “extreme quality” mode: the RADEON X800 XL 512MB was worse than the ordinary RADEON X800 XL! The gap was no more than 5%, but it was stable and repeatable – we reran the test and had the same results. It’s hard to explain this outcome since both cards have identical clock rates and only differ in the amount of graphics memory onboard. Anyway, it doesn’t matter much since the performance of both cards is too low in this mode.