ATi Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition

Name: ATi Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition - Page 11
Brand: ATi

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, December 01, 2004, 08:00 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 antialiasing and with 4x AA and 8X aniso enabled together. In addition, we used a custom recorded demo of an online multiplayer match for our benchmark runs.

At 1,024 x 768, our custom Unreal Tournament 2004 benchmark didn't show either of the flagship cards in this review, the X850 XT Platinum Edition or the GeForce 6800 Ultra, as having a meaningful advantage. The GeForce took the lead in the default test, only to fall behind the X850 once AA and aniso were enabled. With UT 2004 running at 1,600 x 1,200, however, the ATi-powered cards surged ahead. In the high-resolution test, the Radeon X850 XT PE outperformed the X800s by a few percentage points, but it smoked the 6800s. The X850 XT PE was about 6% faster than the GeForce 6800 Ultra when tested at 1,600 x 1,200 without any antialiasing or anisotropic filtering enabled, and it was a hefty 33% faster once 4X AA and 8X aniso was used.

Tags: ATI, Radeon, edition, ATI Radeon, XT, platinum, PLA, 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