Sapphire Radeon X850 XT PE: AGP 8X

Name: Sapphire Radeon X850 XT PE: AGP 8X - Page 9
Brand: Sapphire

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, May 19, 2005, 10:00 PM EDT

Benchmarks &Comparisons With Doom 3 - Single Player

The Wait Is Over!.

Doom 3

id Software's games have long been pushing the limits of 3D graphics. Quake, Quake 2, and Quake 3 were all instrumental in the success of 3D accelerators on the PC. Now, years later, with virtually every new desktop computer shipping with a 3D accelerator, id is at it again with the release of the visually stunning Doom 3. Doom 3 is an OpenGL game using extremely high-detailed textures and a ton of dynamic lighting and shadows. We ran custom demo benchmarks with Doom 3 set to its "High-Quality" mode, at resolutions of 1,024 x 768 and 1,600 x 1,200 without AA enabled and then with 4X AA and 8X Aniso enabled.

The incremental Doom 3 performance improvements ATI has made to their Catalyst driver suite, seem to have really paid off. NVIDIA's cards still perform markedly better than ATI's cards in this game, but the huge lead they had when Doom 3 was initially released has dwindled significantly. In our custom single-player test, the Radeon X850XT Platinum Editions, and the GeForce 6800s performed quite similarly at 1024x768, in both test configurations. Although the X800XL fell behind the pack. With the resolution turned up to 1600x1200, the GeForce cards were able to pull away from the Radeons a bit, besting the X850 XT Platinum Editions by margins ranging from approximately 13% - 15%.

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