ATi Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition

Name: ATi Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition - Page 8
Brand: ATi

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, December 01, 2004, 08:00 AM EDT

Head-to-Head Performance With Tomb Raider: AOD

The Anti-Greatest!

Tomb Raider: AOD

Although Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness won't be winning any "Game of the Year" awards, it does employ some fairly interesting pixel shader 2.0 quality effects, such as depth of field blur. We've recorded a custom demo of Lara jogging through an indoor garden area in the "Prague3" map. When using the Pixel Shader 2.0 code path, this area of the game utilizes a DOF (depth of field) blurring effect to enhance the sense of depth and vastness. We ran our custom demo at a resolution of 1,024 x 768 and then again at 1,600 x 1,200, using both the Pixel Shader 1.4 and 2.0 code paths (with and without 4x antialiasing enabled in the PS 2.0 tests).

ATi-powered video cards have traditionally performed very well in our custom Tomb Raider benchmark. That tradition continues with the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition. ATi's new flagship video card outperformed all of the other products we tested at both resolutions in all six test configurations. The X850 XT PE, with its higher-clocked core and memory, was slightly faster than the X800 XT PE, but it handily beat both of the GeForce 6800s, especially at the higher resolution. At 1,600 x 1,200, the Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition is up to 33% faster than the GeForce 6800 Ultra.

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