Hardcore gamers, with the large disposable incomes necessary to feed their hardware addictions, have a lot to be thankful for at the moment.  Both NVIDIA, with the GeForce 6 Series of products, and ATi, with their X800 Pro and X800 XT, have extremely powerful GPUs in their arsenals that are an order of magnitude faster than the previous generation.  And while the previous battle at the high-end between the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and Radeon 9800 XT was heated, it was never quite as competitive as things are today.  The 9800 XT was almost universally lauded as the "better" choice, but now the choice isn't quite as clear.  Compelling arguments can be made for choosing either NVIDIA's or ATi's flagship architectures at this juncture.  NVIDIA has Shader Model 3.0 support and a clear performance advantage in Doom 3, while ATi's cards are equally as fast, or faster, in most other games, they are single-slot solutions, they have 3Dc support, and buying an X800 doesn't mean upgrading your power-supply as well.

Today on HotHardware, we're going to explore Asus' take on ATi's Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition, the AX800 XT.  This card sports all of the features of the "built by ATi" X800 XT PE, but unlike the ATi branded cards, the Asus AX800 XT has a uniquely colored PCB, lighted cooling fan, and it ships with a beefy accessory and software bundle.  Check it out...

Specifications of the Asus AX800 XT Packed with ATI's Latest...

The Asus AX800 XT ships with an impressive compliment of accessories and software.  Included with the card itself, we found a single DVI to VGA adaptor (for connecting dual analog monitors), a 7-Pin S-Video to HDTV (YprPb) cable, an S-Video and composite RCA-type video in / video out cable, and a Molex power cable splitter.  Curiously missing, especially considering this card has ViVo capabilities, were an S-Video cable and a composite video cable. 

Asus also ships this card with a ton of software.  Inside the included orange, plastic CD case we found two full version games, Counter Strike: Condition Zero and Deus Ex: Invisible War, along with 5 other CDs comprised of Ulead's Cool 3D 2.0 and Photo Express 4.0 SE, ASUS DVD XP, Power Director 3, Media Show and lastly the requisite ASUS Driver and Utilities disc.

The Asus Driver and Utility CD includes copies of Asus' proprietary GameFace Live software, for real-time video/audio communication, and ASUS Video Security on-line.  These two applications work in conjunction with the USB WebCam Asus also bundles with the AX800 XT.  To explain how to use all of these programs and accessories, and install the card itself, Asus also provided a couple of well written user's manuals.

To help illustrate exactly how each of NVIDIA's and ATi's current, and last-generation, high-end cards compare to one another, we've put together a simple chart comparing each product's clock speeds, peak fillrate and peak memory bandwidth...

The Radeon X800 XT's higher-clocked, 16-pipeline core, equate to the highest peak single- and multi-textured fillrates of the lot.  At 8.32GPixels/Sec, the X800 XT's fillrate is a full 15.5% higher than NVIDIA's fastest card, the GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition.  NVIDIA's flagship card, however, has a peak memory bandwidth advantage of 2.6GB/s, or 7.3%.

The Asus AX800 XT Let's Take a Closer Look...

Asus' AX800 XT, is a dead-ringer for their AX800 Pro (reviewed here).  Both cards share the same bright orange PCB, single-slot heavy-duty copper GPU cooler, and nearly silent blue-lighted fan.  Asus' X800s also share the same custom decal on the fan shroud and they both have the same purple Molex power connector located at the upper-corner of the board.  At first glance, the design looks somewhat unique, but in actuality the cards are basically identical to ATi's reference designs, which incidentally were also nearly indistinguishable from each other.

On the back side of the card, the ATi Rage Theater chip, which handles this card's ViVo (Video-In / Video-Out) functionality, can be found along with four of the 8 on-board memory chips.  The Asus AX800 XT is equipped with 256MB of Samsung GDDR3 memory, clocked at 560MHz (1.12GHz DDR).  The chips are branded with the model number "K4J55323QF-GC16".  Locating the reference to these particular chips on Samsung's website reveals that they are rated for 600MHz (1.2GHz DDR) operation, which means there should be a bit of headroom left when overclocking.

The Asus AX800 XT is equipped with ATi's Rage Theater chip which gives the card its Video-In / Video-Out (ViVo) capabilities.  ATi's standard WDM capture drivers are installed with the card, so virtually any Windows compatible video editing & capture program should work properly with the Asus AX800 XT.  To give users the ability to take advantage of the AX800 XT's ViVo features, without having to purchase new software, however, Asus included a few useful utilities and applications with the card.

Bundled Vid-Cap Software ViVo Tools

The most notable of which is Cyberlink's Power Director 3. Upon launching Power Director 3, users are greeted by a clean, editing interface with a set of fairly comprehensive production tools.  With this program, users can capture, edit and author video clips using a single, relatively simple interface.  Clicking on the "Burn" tab launches EZProducer which also gives users the ability to burn their movies directly to a CD or DVD. The screen shots above represent Power Director 3's "Capture", "Edit" and "Produce" menus, as well as EZProducer's main menu.  As you can see, the interface is very straightforward, and should be easily navigable for anyone familiar with this type of timeline-based video editing application. 

Screen Shots: Doom 3 OOOOH...Spooky...

We won't be doing a comprehensive image quality comparison between ATi's and NVIDIA's best GPUs in this article, because we've done similar comparisons in a few past reviews.  If you'd like to take a closer look at the differences in image quality between NVIDIA and ATi at the current time, however, please reference this review of Asus' AX800 Pro and this article covering the launch of ATi's new X800 GPUs.

Instead of doing an in-depth comparison here, we've got a few screen shots from id's visually stunning Doom 3. The five screen shots above were taken with Doom 3 running in "High Quality" mode at a resolution of 1024x768, with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled.  As you can see, thanks to id's extensive use of lighting and shadows, and high-resolution textures, Doom 3 looks absolutely amazing on the Asus AX800 XT.  You'll see a little later that the X800 XT's performance isn't quite up to par with the GeForce 6800 in Doom 3, but the game is still perfectly playable in "High Quality" mode at resolutions all the way up to and including 1600x1200.

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the Asus AX800 XT on an i875P based DFI LANPARTY Pro875B motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium 4 3.2CGHz CPU. The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and loaded the "High Performance Defaults". Then we set the memory to operate at 200MHz in dual-channel mode, with the CAS Latency and other memory timings set by the SPD, and then we set the AGP aperture size to 256MB. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with SP1 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the Intel chipset drivers and hit the Windows Update site to download and install all of the available updates. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers for the rest of our components and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating, System Restore and Drive Indexing were then disabled, the hard drive was de-fragmented and a 768MB permanent page file was created on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance", installed the benchmarking software and ran all of the tests.

The HotHardware Test System Intel Powered Screamer

Performances Comparisons With Final Fantasy XI Benchmark 2 v1.01 A Classic Console Franchise On The PC

Final Fantasy XI

The Final Fantasy franchise is well known to console gamers, but Squaresoft has since made the jump to the PC with a MMORPG version of this classic. The Final Fantasy XI benchmark runs through multiple scenes from the game and displays a final score every time a full cycle of the demo is completed. Although the demo is meant the check an entire system's readiness to play the game, the number of frames rendered scales when different video cards are used. Lower scores indicate some frames were dropped to complete the demo in the allotted time. The scores below were taken with the demo set to its "High Resolution" option (1024x768), with anti-aliasing disabled.

The Asus AX800 XT finished the Final Fantasy XI benchmark well ahead of all of the NVIDIA powered cards we tested. With its score of 6334, the AX800 XT finished the test 401 frames ahead of the GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme edition (6.75% faster) and 410 frames ahead of the standard 6800 Ultra (6.92% faster).  This is definitely not one of the more taxing benchmarks in our suite though, so lets move onto something a little more intensive...

Benchmarks With Halo Halo - All Patched & Ready To Go!

Halo

For many gamers, the release of Halo marked the end of a long wait, since it was originally released as an Xbox exclusive a few years back. No additional patches or tweaks are needed to benchmark with Halo, as Gearbox has included all of the necessary information in their README file. The Halo benchmark runs through four of the cut-scenes from the game, after which the average frame rate is recorded. We patched the game using the latest v1.04 patch and ran this benchmark twice, once at 1024x768 and then again at 1600x1200. Anti-aliasing doesn't work properly with Halo, so all of the test below were run with anti-aliasing disabled.

Halo clearly belonged to the GeForce 6800 Ultras.  At 1024x768, the 6800 Extreme Edition was almost 10 frames per second faster than the AX800 XT, and the standard 6800 Ultra was almost 8 frames per second faster.  Even the GeForce 6800 GT, which is much less expensive than the AX800 XT, was able to outpace it at 1024x768. When we ratcheted the resolution up to 1600x1200, the Ultras were once again able to outpace the AX800 XT by considerable margins, but the 6800 GT fell into last place this time around.

Performances Comparisons With Splinter Cell Stealthy Combat

Splinter Cell

Splinter Cell's version 1.2 patch includes three pre-recorded demos and incorporates a previously unavailable benchmarking tool. The demos included with the patch are somewhat limited by CPU performance, however, so we opted for the custom Oil Rig demo created by the folks at Beyond 3D to test with this game. Beyond 3D's demo removes two CPU intensive routines while increasing dependence on Pixel Shader performance. Shaders are used to render realistic looking ocean water surrounding an Oil Rig in the demo, as well as simulating a night vision effect for a brief period. Take note that anti-aliasing doesn't work with Splinter Cell in its current state. Due to this fact, we do not have any AA scores listed in the graphs below.

The NVIDIA powered cards finished 1 - 2 - 3 in the Splinter Cell benchmark, when run at a resolution of 1024x768, although the spread between the first and last place finishers was only 3.24 frames per second.  The landscape changed when the resolution was raised to 1600x1200, however.  Here, the AX800 XT finished the test just behind the GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition, and a couple of frames per second ahead of the standard GeForce 6800 Ultra.

Head-to-Head Performance With Unreal Tournament 2004 Epic's Next Smash Hit!

Unreal Tournament 2K4

Epic's "Unreal" games have been wildly popular, ever since the original Unreal was released in the late '90s. Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and then Unreal Tournament 2003, rapidly became some of our favorites, for both benchmarking and for killing a few hours when our schedules allowed! Epic recently released the latest addition to the franchise, Unreal Tournament 2004. We used a fully patched (v3120) full version of the game to benchmark these cards at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1600x1200, without any anti-aliasing, with 4x AA, and lastly with 4X AA and 16X aniso.

Unreal Tournament 2004 was essentially CPU bound at 1024x768, at all three test configurations.  All four of the cards we tested performed at similar levels, with the GeForce 6800 Ultra posting framerates that were marginally faster then the rest.  With Unreal Tournament 2004 running at 1600x1200 though, the performance deltas were much more pronounced.  At the higher resolution, the 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition led the pack when anti-aliasing was disabled and again when 4X AA was enabled, but with 4X anti-aliasing and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently, the AX800 XT was the fastest card in the pack by about 12%.

Performance Comparisons With Aquamark 3 DX8 and DX9 Shaders

Aquamark 3

Aquamark 3 comes to us by way of Massive Development. Massive's release of the original Aquanox in 1999 wasn't very well received by the gaming community, but it was one of the first games to implement DX8 class shaders, which led to the creation of Aquamark 2 - a benchmark previously used by many analysts. Since the Aquamark benchmarks are based on an actual game engine, they must support old and new video cards alike. Thus, the latest version of Aquamark, Aquamark 3, utilizes not only DirectX 9 class shaders, but DirectX 8 and DirectX 7 as well. We ran this benchmark at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1600x1200 with no anti-aliasing, with 4x AA, and with 4X AA and 16X aniso enabled concurrently.

It's tough to declare the best overall performer in the Aquamark 3 benchmark.  At 1024x768, the AX800 XT fell behind the GeForce 6800s when anti-aliasing was disabled, but with 4X AA and again with 4X AA and 16X aniso, the AX800 XT basically tied the 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition, where both cards finished within 1 frame per second of the other.  Raising the resolution to 1600x1200, somewhat tipped the scales in favor of the AX800 XT, however.  At 1600x1200, the 6800 Ultras were fastest when no anti-aliasing was applied, but with 4X the AX800 XT pulled slightly ahead of the GeForces, and with 4XAA and 16X aniso enabled together the AX800 XT was a full 14.4% faster than the fastest GeForce.

Head-to-Head Performance With Tomb Raider: AOD The Anti-Greatest!

Tomb Raider: AOD

Although Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness won't be winning any "Game of the Year" awards, it is one of the more advanced DirectX games currently available. We've recorded a custom demo of Lara jogging through an indoor garden area in the "Prague3" map. When using the Pixel Shader 2.0 code path, this area of the game utilizes a DOF (depth of field) blurring effect to enhance the sense of depth and size. We ran our custom demo at a resolution of 1024x768 and then again at 1600x1200, using both the Pixel Shader 1.4 and 2.0 code paths (with and without 4x anti-aliasing enabled in the PS 2.0 tests).

With our custom Tomb Raider benchmark, the Asus AX800 XT was dominant at 1024x768.  When using the PS 1.4 code path at 1024x768, all of the cards performed similarly, but when using the PS 2.0 path, with and without anti-aliasing, the AX800 XT smoked all of the NVIDIA powered cards by over 20%.  We saw more of the same when we raised the resolution up to 1600x1200, but this time around the AX800 XT's performance wasn't nearly as commanding and the GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition was able to pull ahead of the XT by a miniscule margin.  The Asus AX800 XT was still able to stave off the standard GeForce 6800 Ultra and GeForce 6800 GT though.

Benchmarks / Comparisons With Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory Q3 Engine Based Freebie

Wolfenstein: ET

We also ran through a batch of timedemos with the OpenGL game Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Wolfenstein: ET is a free, standalone multiplayer game that is based on the excellent Return to Castle Wolfenstein, that was released a few years back. It uses a heavily modified version of the Quake 3 engine, which makes it a very easy to use benchmarking tool. We created our own custom demo and used the built-in timedemo feature to check each card's frame-rate. The tests below were run at 1024x768 and again at 1600x1200, without anti-aliasing, with 4X AA, wand lastly with 4X AA and 16X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

Although our custom Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory demo has lots of on-screen characters fighting in both indoor and outdoor scenes, it is not able to tax any of these high-end video cards when running at 1024x768.  At the lower resolution, all of the cards were basically CPU bound, except for the AX800 XT when anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were enabled in concert.  Bumping the resolution up to 1600x1200 puts a little strain on the cards, however.  At the higher resolution, the AX800 XT lagged slightly behind the GeForce cards when no AA was used, but the AX800 pulled ahead by over 10% when 4X AA and 16X aniso were used.

Benchmarks and Comparisons With Far Cry DX9 effects galore.

Far Cry

If you've been on top of the gaming scene, you probably know that Far Cry is one of the most visually impressive games to be released on the PC to date.  Far Cry gives us a taste of what is to come in next generation 3D Gaming on the PC.  We benchmarked the graphics cards in this review with a custom recorded demo run taken in the "Catacombs" area checkpoint, at various resolutions without AA or Aniso Filtering enabled and then with 4X AA enabled, and lastly with 4X AA and 16X Aniso enabled together.

To paraphrase a disclaimer about these FarCry numbers from a previous review: Performance in this game is going to change dramatically when the v1.2 patch is officially re-released in the next few weeks.  With the new patch, SM 3.0 support will be available to the GeForce 6 series of cards, SM2.0b will be made available to the Radeon X800s, and instancing support will be available to both.  All of which increase performance.  For now though, if you bought the game today, and installed it today, without using any beta drivers or patches, this is how the cards we tested would fare.

With that said, it's clear that at the moment, the AX800 XT is the best choice for FarCry players.  At 1024x768, the AX800 XT outpaced the GeForce 6800s at all three test configurations, especially when AA and aniso were enabled.  At 1600x1200 it was a much closer race.  With the exception of the 4X AA test where the 6800 Extreme Edition and AX800 XT finished in a dead-heat, the AX800 XT was clearly superior, outpacing the 6800 EE by about 9%.

Benchmarks and Comparisons With Doom 3 The Wait is Over!.

Doom 3

id Software's games have long been pushing the limits of 3D graphics.  Quake, Quake 2 and Quake 3 were all instrumental to the success of 3D accelerators on the PC.  Now, years later with virtually every new desktop computer shipping with a 3D accelerator, id is at it again with the release of the visually stunning Doom 3.  Doom 3 is an OpenGL game using extremely high-detailed textures and a ton of dynamic lighting and shadows.  We ran benchmarks with Doom 3 set to its "High-Quality" mode, at resolutions of 1024x768 and 1600x1200 without AA or Aniso Filtering enabled and then with 4X AA, and with 4X AA and 16X Aniso enabled.

Ever since Doom 3 was first announced, NVIDIA has been claiming that their new GPUs were being "designed for Doom 3".  Now, with the full-release of the game on store shelves, it appears that this claim has some merit.  All of the NVIDIA powered cards, even the GeForce 6800 GT which is currently selling for about $200 less than the Asus AX800 XT, crush the XT by considerable margins of up to 37% at 1024x768.  Things remain gloomy for the AX800 XT at 1600x1200, where it loses out by margins ranging from 30-52%.  These scores were taking with the Catalyst 4.8 drivers, however.  ATi has made a beta version of the Catalyst 4.9 drivers available that offer increased performance with this game.  Let's take a look...

Benchmarks and Comparisons With Doom 3 (Continued) OpenGL Doom and Gloom...

Pay close attention to the graphs below, as we've removed the GeForce 6800 GT for the sake of continuity.  In these next two graphs, we ran the same timedemo from the previous page, but we installed the beta Catalyst 4.9 drivers available on ATi's website.  These drivers were specifically released for "users interested in increasing performance of Doom 3."

Looking at the new numbers, it's clear that ATi still has some major optimizing to do to make the X800 XT's performance more competitive with the GeForce 6 series, but even with the Catalyst 4.9 drivers in this relatively early stage of development, ATi has been able to squeeze quite a bit of performance from the X800 XT in Doom 3.  Without any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering, the Catalyst 4.9s are slightly faster than the 4.8s, but with 4X AA and with 4XAA and 16X aniso, the Catalyst 4.9 drivers are about 10% faster at both resolutions.  ATi's performance is still well below NVIDIA's in Doom 3, and it's not likely they'll be able to catch NVIDIA here, but rest assured there is still more performance coming to the X800 XT in this popular game.

Overclocking the Asus Radeon X800 Pro Making Fast, Faster...

Up to this point, it's obvious that the Asus AX800 XT is fast, but we all know there is always more untapped performance that can be unlocked by overclocking.  We installed the latest version of Rage3D tweak and slowly raised the core and memory clock speeds on the Asus AX800 XT until we begun to see visual artifacts on-screen and our test system became unstable...

Our overclocking results weren't very inspiring.  In the end, we were only able to take the Asus AX800 XT up from its default core and memory clock speeds of 520MHz / 560MHz (1.12GHz DDR) up to 531MHz / 574MHz (1.15GHz).  We then re-ran a couple of the more taxing high-resolution benchmarks in our suite with the card overclocked to see what kind of performance gains were realized by overclocking it.  Performance in Aquamark 3 increased by only 2.8% and performance in Doom 3 increased by a paltry 3.1%.

Benchmark Summary:  We tested all of the cards in this review in 41 different configurations and found that the GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition was the fastest card in 18 of the tests, the Asus AX800 XT was the fastest card in 12 of the tests, and the remaining 11 tests concluded in a draw.  The GeForce was mostly faster when AA was disabled and when 4X AA was enabled.  It was also clearly superior in Doom 3, but the Radeon shined with using anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering concurrently in most of the tests.  Subtract Doom 3 from the equation, however, and the win / lose / draw ratio becomes 12 W - 12 L - 11 D.  How's that for close competition?

The Asus AX800 XT is a fine choice for hardcore gamers in the market for a high-end card such as this.  Asus has included a very complete bundle of accessories and software, including two full games, the card is backed by a very well respected company, and performance was excellent in all but one of the benchmarks we ran, Doom 3.  This is, however, quite an expensive product and finding one may prove to be difficult.  We found five on-line retailers that listed this card in their inventory, but none of them had it in stock and all were selling the AX800 XT for a price in excess of $580 U.S. A few of the retailers expected delivery this week, but we weren't able to found out in what quantities they would be arriving. We expect there won't be many available in the immediate future though.  It'll probably be a few more weeks before these cards become more common. Based on its performance, single-slot near silent cooler, and good bundle, we're giving the Asus AX800 XT an 8.5 on the HotHardware Heat Meter.

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