Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X800 XL

Name: Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X800 XL - Page 9
Brand: Sapphire

by Marco Chiappetta — Monday, February 21, 2005, 10:00 PM EDT

Benchmarks & Comparisons With Half-Life 2

It Shipped! And it's GOOD!

Half Life 2

Thanks to the dedication of millions of gamers and a huge mod-community, the original Half-Life became one of the most successful first person shooters of all time. So when Valve announced Half-Life 2 was close to completion in mid 2003, gamers the world over began chomping at the bit. Unfortunately, thanks to a compromised internal network; the theft of a portion of the game's source code; a couple of missed deadlines; and a tumultuous relationship with the game's distributor, Vivendi Universal, we all had to wait until November 2004 to get our hands on this gem. We benchmarked Half-Life 2 with a long, custom- recorded timedemo that takes us along a cliff and through a few dilapidated shacks, battling the enemy throughout. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,600 x 1,200 without any AA or aniso and with 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

Sapphire's Hybrid Radeon X800 XL returned to its winning ways in our custom Half Life 2 benchmark. Here, the Sapphire card outperformed both the GeForce 6800 GT and GeForce 6800 Ultra, regardless of the resolution or test configuration. At 1024x768 without anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, the Sapphire Hybrid Radeon X800 XL was 8.7% faster than the GT, and with AA and aniso enabled the X800 XL extended its lead to over 29%. The same trend held true at 1600x1200, where the Sapphire Radeon X800 XL was roughly 15% (no aa) and 12% (4XAA / 8X Aniso) faster.

Tags: Radeon, Sapphire, App, Hybrid, SAP, X8, AP, id

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