ATi Radeon X700 XT - ATi's Answer To The GeForce 6600

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the ATi Radeon X700 XT on a Shuttle SB81 i915 chipset-based motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium 4 550 @ 3.4GHz 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 SP2 was installed. When the installation was complete, we installed the Intel chipset drivers. 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 defragmented, 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

Radeon X700 XT Image Quality Looking Sharp

We'll let the screen captures we took below speak for themselves because, frankly, there really isn't much to say.  We were hard pressed to detect any perceptible difference in the screen captures below when running with the different Catalyst A.I. settings that are available in ATi's new drivers.

UT2004: 1024x768 (4X/8X) Catalyst A.I. = Off	UT2004: 1024x768 (4X/8X) Catalyst A.I. = Low	UT2004: 1024x768 (4X/8X) Catalyst A.I. = High
Doom3: 1024x768 (4X/8X) Catalyst A.I. = Off	Doom3: 1024x768 (4X/8X) Catalyst A.I. = Low	Doom3: 1024x768 (4X/8X) Catalyst A.I. = High

All of the screen shots that we've taken here, in Unreal Tournament 2004 and Doom 3, look virtually identical.  Clearly, at least from our perspective, ATi's new Catalyst A.I. feature isn't sacrificing anything in terms of image quality.  We'll also click through a few benchmarks with the standard mode and advanced mode on to show you the gains in performance that are available with this new feature.