The HIS X800XT is up against stiff competition today in the form of a POV GeForce 6800 Ultra. We have also included cards from the £300 price point, namely the X800 Pro and the 6800GT. The 9800XT represents the fastest from the previous generation of cards so you can see if its worth upgrading!
LOMAC is pretty much the most intensive game I have played this year when it comes to stressing the graphics card. Push up the detail and the game has the ability to reduce any system to its knees. Even the X800 XT struggles when the going gets tough at decent resolution on this test.
In LOMAC you can see that the X800 XT is a few frames per second faster than the nVIDIA competition, but the difference wouldn't really be noticeable whilst gaming. The lower priced cards show the benefit of spending the extra on an X800XT or 6800 Ultra if you are a fan of flight sims like this.
Unreal Tournament 2004 is definitely an evolution of the prequel rather than a brand new game experience, but it certainly ups the ante in terms of graphics detail. All four cards tested were perfectly playable, even when the going got tough, but theX800XT is definitely quicker once eye candy is enabled.
Although not displayed in the graph, 1600x1200x32 with 4xAA and 8xAF enabled was much faster on the X800XT vs the 6800 ultra.
FarCry is certainly the best shooter of the year so far, and as you can see how graphically intensive by the performance of the 9800 XT card. These tests were conducted using the latest available patch, though not the one with SM3 optimisations since this has not been made available to us.
The X800 XT is dominant in this benchmark vs the 6800 Ultra, although all cards are very playable. Bottom line, the best card for FarCry until they fix the 2.0 patch is ATi's flagship.
Halo rivals even LOMAC in its ability to crush even the highest spec PCs. An interesting fact when you think it’s derived from a “mere” X-box with its GeForce 3 graphics card. Note that FSAA still isn’t available even with the latest Halo patches, so we were restricted to changing just the resolution.
The X800XT and the 6800 Ultra are within a hair’s breadth of each other, as are the X800 Pro and 6800GT cards.
Wolfenstein is not a new title, nor is it based on a new engine. Nonetheless, it is a pretty harsh test on the graphics subsystem. New and feature laden OpenGL titles are getting thin on the ground these days!
nVIDIA’s OpenGL dominance continues with the 6800 Ultra being 8fps quicker with the eye candy enabled. The difference isn't noticeable however.
Doom 3 offers a new level of graphical realism, and although I have been slightly disappointed with the game itself, as ever ID is impeccable in the marketability of their engines. It is a well documented fact that the 6800 series is quicker than the X800 series, but ATi have just released the 4.9 beta catalyst drivers that offer improved performance, and other tweaks can be made by replacing certain shader files.
Implementing the driver change can have a positive effect on playing Doom 3, not that the game isn’t fully playable at high resolution with even the X800 Pro anyway. The X800 XT PE enjoys an increase in performance of about 6%, where as the pro increases by a more modest 3%. With either set of drivers, Doom 3 is still an nVIDIA dominated game right now. The 6800 is clearly mighty in this title.
