eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition

Name: eVGA GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition - Page 6
Brand: eVGA

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, August 11, 2004, 06:00 PM 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 is one of the more advanced DirectX games currently available. 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 size. We ran our custom demo at a resolution of 1024x768 and then again at 1600x1200, using both the Pixel Shader 1.4 and 2.0 code paths (with and without 4x anti-aliasing enabled in the PS 2.0 tests).

It seems that NVIDIA has lost a bit of performance in the Tomb Raider: AOD benchmark with their latest set of Forceware drivers. If you go back to some of our past reviews, you'll see that they were a few percentage points faster when using some older driver sets. Here, the Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition jumped out to a huge lead at 1024x768 in both of the Pixel Shader 2.0 tests (the PS1.0 tests were fairly even). When we bumped the resolution up to 1600x1200, the eVGA card pulled ahead in the PS 1.0 test, only to fall back behind again in the PS 2.0 test. With 4X AA enabled, the eVGA 6800 Ultra EE and X800 XT PE shared a victory, finishing within a fraction of frame per second of each other.

Tags: GeForce, evga, VGA, Xtreme, extreme, edition, Ultra, Extreme Edition, force, XT, 680, ULT, eme

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