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Review: ATi Radeon X800 XT PCIe
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Far
Cry benchmark numbers are generated by repeated playing
of the Research map, which consists of an good mix of beach,
jungle, and interior settings found throughout the game’s
various levels. Fraps is used to record performance as the
same path is taken through the map during each test. Both
anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were enabled via the
Catalyst Control Center and all in-game options were configured
for their highest settings (water at ultra high).
Far Cry is the most graphically
demanding game in SimHQ’s benchmark suite, and is the
only title tested that makes use of DX9 shaders. As such,
it certainly allows the X800 XT to shine, as the above scores
indicate, pushing into 3-digit frame rates at 1024x768. With
anti-aliasing enabled, the performance loss scales from roughly
15-30%, while anisotropic filtering is even lower, roughly
5-15%. Even high quality offers playable frame rates at 1600x1200,
at which point the game is rendering some of the best visuals
currently available for PC gaming.
Developed using id Software’s
five-year-old Quake 3 engine, Call
of Duty is the second title SimHQ uses testing OpenGL
rather than the D3D API. Scores were derived from the Dawnville
demo using the in-game timedemo utility to capture performance.
The “com_maxfps” console command was also used to
lift the default frame rate cap of 85.
Based on an aging engine, Call
of Duty isn’t particularly graphics intensive, though
the title still looks good once AA and AF are enabled. Both
features incur very similar performance losses, and the game
stays in the realm of triple digit frame rates even at 1600x1200
with high quality settings.
NASCAR
Racing 2003 Season was tested using SimHQ’s in-house
replay, which consists of a crowded Daytona track with the
camera view set to Earnhardt’s cockpit. All graphics
options were placed at their highest settings.
This driving simulation obviously
scales far closer to system rather than graphics processing
power, essentially locking itself at 35-38 fps across all
tested resolutions and settings. And with shadows enabled,
NASCAR performs much slower in these tests compared to scores
from SimHQ’s CPU articles which test without shadows.
Last, SimHQ has decided to include
scores from Valve’s Video
Stress Test, a utility now included with the new Source
engine-based version of Counter-Strike. The update
of the popular online shooter is currently available only
via Valve’s distribution package, Steam, but will be
bundled with Half Life 2 once the game reaches store
shelves. The Video Stress test itself is a fly-by of a relatively
small custom level and is designed to show off numerous graphical
effects rendered through the heavy use of various shaders.
It’s interesting to note that
the Video Stress test loses more performance from the fill-rate
demands of higher resolutions than it does from either AA
or AF. Anti-aliasing costs the test slightly more at higher
resolutions than anisotropic filtering, roughly 5-20% across
the resolutions. At high quality the frame rate is cut by
some 45% across the resolutions, though if the test represents
a game’s final performance based on the Source engine,
74 fps at 1600x1200 with 4x AA and 8x AF is hardly a negligible
score.
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