ATi Radeon X700 XT - ATi's Answer To The GeForce 6600
Final Fantasy XI & Halo
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 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 to 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. |
Although the Final Fantasy X1 benchmark has a somewhat synthetic feel to it, with respect to its arbitrary scoring values rather than actual frame rate, the test does utilize actual in-game demo runs of various scenes in the game. As you can see in the scoring above, the X700 XT takes the lead, handily beating out the nearest competitor and posting up over 500 points higher than the GeForce 6600GT. If you've ever watched this benchmark run through its demo scenes, you'll note that there are lots of characters on the screen at any given time. Sometimes there are literally hundreds of little elfin creatures on the screen, and that's a lot of polygons to render. The X700's stronger six vertex engine-driven core, seems to power it through this benchmark to victory.
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 Halo |
For many gamers, the release of Halo marked the end of a long wait because 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 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 v1.04 patch and ran this benchmark twice, once at 1,024 x 768 and then again at 1,600 x 1,200. Anti-aliasing doesn't work properly with Halo, so all of the tests below were run with anti-aliasing disabled. |
Here's an interesting turn of events with our Halo benchmarking results. As you can see, the X700 XT actually has a bit more muscle in our low-resolution test, due most likely to its vertex engine advantage. However, when you scale up to high res at 1,600 X 1,200, the new ATi card falls back dramatically, suggesting a fill rate deficit comparatively, for the eight-pipe 475MHz X700 VPU versus the eight-pipe 500MHz GeForce 6600 GT GPU.
