ATI Radeon X800 XL Review

Name: ATI Radeon X800 XL Review - Page 10
Brand: ATI

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

Benchmarks & Comparisons With Far Cry

DX9 Effects Galore.

Far Cry

If you've been on top of the gaming scene, you probably know that Far Cry is one of the most visually impressive games to be released on the PC to date. Although Doom 3 and Half Life 2 have both arrived, Far Cry still looks great in comparison, especially with the new v1.3 patch installed and some special effects turned on. Far Cry came along and gave us a taste of what was to come in next-generation 3D gaming on the PC. We benchmarked the graphics cards in this review with a custom-recorded demo run taken in the "Catacombs" area checkpoint at various resolutions without AA or Aniso Filtering enabled and then with 4X AA enabled along with 8X anisotropic filtering. Geometry instancing and normal map compression were enabled for these tests, but HDR rending was disabled. The default pixel shader code path was used.

Our custom FarCry benchmark has all of the cards performing similarly at 1024x768, at both test configurations, with the Radeon X800 XL and GeForce 6800 GT performing at essentially the same levels, give or take a couple of frames per second. With FarCry running at 1600x1200 the performance landscape changes a bit, however. At the higher resolution, the Radeon X800 XL couldn't quite keep pace with the other cards. It trailed behind the GeForce 6800 GT by about 8% in the standard test at 1600x1200, and by about 12% once anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were enabled.

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