ATI Radeon X800 XL Review

Name: ATI Radeon X800 XL Review - Page 4
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, December 15, 2004, 08:01 AM EDT

Benchmarks With Halo

Halo - All Patched & Ready To Go!

Halo

For many gamers, the release of Halo marked the end of a long wait. To the chagrin of some PC gamers, Halo 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 v1.05 patch and ran this benchmark twice, once at 1,024 x 768 and then again at 1,600 x 1,200. Antialiasing doesn't work properly with Halo, so all of the tests below were run with antialiasing disabled.

Halo proved to be a bit irksome for the Radeon X800 XL. In the lower resolution test, the X800 XL finished about 8 frames per second, or roughly 10%, behind the competition. All of the other cards tested performed within 1 frame per second of each other. With the resolution turned up to 1600x1200, the X800 XL again fell victim to the competition, lagging behind the GeForce 6800 GT by 5.76 FPS, which equated to an 11% disadvantage. But keep in mind that the X800 XL's MSRP is also 25% lower than the 6800 GT.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, ATI Radeon, review, view, IE, 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