ATi Radeon X800 XT & X800 Pro - Heart Burn For The NV40
Without question Halo for the PC is a bit more mainstream than Tomb Raid AOD, and it has a large following with both single player an multi-player on line functionality. Halo also sports a few tasty DX9 pixel shader effects to enhance it's graphical appeal.
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For many gamers, the release of Halo marked the end of a long wait, since 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 their 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 1024x768 and then again at 1280x1024. Anti-aliasing doesn't work properly with Halo at the moment, so all of the test below were run with anti-aliasing disabled. |
Here again it looks very much like ATi's Radeon X800 series VPUs have somewhat better overall shader performance, as is seen at a less fill rate dependant 1024X768 resolution. Here the X800s steal the show, with even the 12 pipe X800 Pro coming within striking distance of the 6800 Ultra and also leaving behind the GeForce 6800GT. The Radeon X800 XT has about 6% advantage over the fastest GeForce card, in this test.
At 1280X1024 resolution, fill rate becomes more of a factor and the Radeon X800 Pro falls short of the GF 6800GT. The Radeon X800 XT however, retains its lead over the fastest GeForce 6800 Ultra score, just edging out NVIDIA's speed binned Ultra Extreme (or plus model) and besting the 6800 Ultra "standard" by about 5%.
