X-bit labs

ATI's 0.11 Micron Chip on the Run: ATI RADEON X800 XL Review (page 9)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 03/21/2005 | 09:14 AM ]

Painkiller: Battle out of Hell

The sequel to Painkiller differs but slightly from the original game, yet it features new special effects, new maps and monsters. The benchmark mode has been changed, too. There are now monsters present in the test scene which brings it closer to the real game process.

Cards from ATI and NVIDIA run this game at the same speed in low resolutions, being limited by the central processor of the system. But in 1280x1024 we can already see that the RADEON X800 XL/XT cards are faster than the GeForce 6800 GT, even though the gamer will see no difference at frame rates above 100fps. There’s practically no gap between the RADEON X800 XL and RADEON X800 XT.

GPU frequency seems to be of much value in this game: the high-frequency GeForce 6600 GT and RADEON X700 XT GPUs are sometimes faster than the GeForce 6800/6800 GT, especially in high resolutions. NVIDIA’s multi-GPU technology works incorrectly in this game – SLI leads to a performance hit.

The RADEON X800 XL boasts an even bigger advantage over the GeForce 6800 GT in the “eye candy” mode – it’s more than 40% in 1600x1200 resolution! In this resolution we also see that the X800 XL is slower than the X800 XT, while the GeForce 6600 GT SLI suddenly speeds up. We checked the latter fact out, but couldn’t find an explanation. It’s really a mystery why SLI technology decided to shows itself in Painkiller: Battle out of Hell in a single resolution and only with enabled full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.