Abit Fatal1ty Radeon X800 XL

Name: Abit Fatal1ty Radeon X800 XL - Page 4
Brand: Abit

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, November 03, 2005, 12:00 PM EDT

Performance Comparisons with Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.04

Details: http://www.splintercell3.com/us/

SC: Chaos Theory

We've recently added Ubisoft's great new game, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, to our suite of game benchmarks. Based on a heavily modified version of the Unreal Engine, enhanced with a slew of DX9 shaders, lighting and mapping effects, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is gorgeous with its very immersive, albeit dark environment. The game engine has a shader model 3.0 code path that allows the GeForce 6 & 7 Series of cards, and the new X1000 family of cards, to really shine, and a recent patch has implemented a shader model 2.0 path for ATI's X8x0 generation of graphics hardware. For these tests we enabled the SM 3.0 path on the GeForce cards, but the SM 2.0 path was enabled for the older Radeons. High Dynamic Range rendering and parallax mapping were disabled, and we benchmarked the game at resolutions of 1,280 x 1024 and 1,600 x 1,200, both with and without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.

Abit's Fatal1ty X800 XL 512MB handled Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory fairly well. Even though the card is clocked higher than other X800 XLs when in xTurbo mode, and it's got 512MB of frame buffer memory, it wasn't quite able to catch the Radeon X850 XT or GeForce 7800 GT. When anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering was enabled though, the Fatal1ty X800 XL 512MB was able to nudge ahead of the GeForce 6800 Ultra and narrow the lead held by the other cards we tested.

Tags: Radeon, Fatal1ty, Abit, TAL, X8

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com