Sapphire Radeon X850 XT PE: AGP 8X

Name: Sapphire Radeon X850 XT PE: AGP 8X - Page 11
Brand: Sapphire

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, May 19, 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 eagerly anticipated its release. 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 HL2. We benchmarked this game with a long, custom- recorded timedemo in the "canals" map, that takes us through both an outdoor and an indoor environment. These tests were run at resolutions of 1,024x768 and 1,600 x 1,200 without any AA or aniso and with 4X anti-aliasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled concurrently.

If you take our Doom 3 performance results, and reverse the order of the victors, you'll have our Half Life 2 performance results! With this game, the Radeon X850XT Platinum Editions outpaced the GeForce cards by a narrow margin in both test configurations at 1024x768, but pulled ahead at 1600x1200. With HL2 running at the higher resolution, the X850XT PEs were approximately 13.2% and 21% faster than the GeForce 6800 Ultra in our two respective test configurations.

Tags: Radeon, Sapphire, App, SAP, XT, AG, X8, AP

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