ATI Mobility Radeon X700 Showcase

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: The Acer TravelMate 8100 notebook we used for testing had a clean installation of Windows XP Professional w/ SP2.  To get it ready for benchmarks, the first thing we did was hit the Windows Update site and downloaded all of the available updates. Then we removed Windows Messenger from the system, disabled auto-updating, drive indexing, and system restore, and then we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drive, and ran the tests...

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Benchmarks with Halo v1.06 Halo - All Patched & Ready To Go!

Halo

For many gamers, the release of Halo marked the end of a very long wait.  To the chagrin of some PC gamers, Halo was originally released as an Xbox exclusive a few years back. But Microsoft eventually released it for the PC. No additional patches or tweaks are needed to benchmark with Halo, as Gearbox has included all of the necessary information in its 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 v1.06 patch and ran this benchmark twice, once at 1,024 x 768 and then again at 1,400 x 1,050. Antialiasing doesn't work properly with Halo, so all of the tests below were run with antialiasing disabled.

Unfortunately, we did not have access to a similarly configured laptop with graphics powered by a competing GPU, and configuring a similar desktop system also was not possible, so the Mobility Radeon X700's benchmark scores will have to stand on their own for now.  When additional Mobile i915 Express (Alviso) based notebooks arrive in the lab, using the same CPU but a different GPU, we'll post its benchmark scores ASAP to give you all a frame of reference.

We would also like to point out, that most of the games we used to benchmark the Mobility Radeon X700 did not support the 15.4" LCD's native WSXGA (1680x1050) resolution.  So, we benchmarked the games at resolutions of 1024x768, and whatever the highest resolution available in-game that worked with the TravelMate 8100's LCD.  In some cases this was 1280x1024, 1400x1050, or 1680x1050.

Halo didn't pose much of a problem for the Mobility Radeon X700.  At 1024x768, the MR X700 just barely missed breaking the 50 FPS mark. And with the resolution turned up to 1400x1050, the Mobility Radeon X700 also performed fairly well finishing just shy of 30 frames per second.