ATI Radeon X800 XL Review

Name: ATI Radeon X800 XL Review - Page 9
Brand: ATI

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

Head-to-Head Performance With Unreal Tournament 2004

Epic's Next Smash Hit!

Unreal Tournament 2K4

Epic's "Unreal" games have been wildly popular ever since the original Unreal was released in the late '90s. Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and then Unreal Tournament 2003 rapidly became some of our favorites for both benchmarking and for killing a few hours when our schedules permitted it. Epic recently released the latest addition to the franchise, Unreal Tournament 2004. We used a patched (v3323) full version of the game to benchmark these cards at resolutions of 1,024 x 768 and 1,600 x 1,200, without any anti-aliasing and with 4x AA and 8X aniso enabled together. In addition, we used a custom recorded demo of an on-line multi-player match for our benchmark runs.

Score another victory for the Radeon X800 XL. When testing with Unreal Tournament 2004 with our custom demo, the Radeon X800 XL dropped only 2 frames per second behind the GeForce 6800 Ultra when no AA or aniso was used at 1024x768, but it flipped the script once anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were turned on at this resolution. The same rings true when comparing the X800 XL to the 6800 GT, but the XL's margin of victory was much larger. With the game's resolution raised to 1600x1200, the Radeon X800 XL performed at the same level at the 6800 Ultra with no AA or aniso. Turn on anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, however, and the X800 XL pulls way ahead of the Ultra and the GT, besting them by roughly 12% and 27%, respectively.

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