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Performance

We've established that image quality from the NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT and ATI Radeon X800XL is only very close with application controlled anisotropic filtering. Unfortunately, not all games support this feature (both old and new). There will always be differences in image quality from both cards (and vendors) - it's up to you to decide whether or not these differences are acceptable. So, remember these facts while you're looking at the performance numbers. To better present what these cards have to offer, we include performance results for both NVIDIA's High Quality and Quality in addition to ATI's default application preference (whenever possible) or forced anisotropic filtering. There's also an fps progress graph and fps distribution table. So without further ado, here are the results.

Our test setup
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ socket 939
2 x 256 MB Kingston KVR 3-3-3 PC3200 DDR-SDRAM
MSI K8N NForce 4 SLI motherboard
Maxtor DiamondMaxPlus9 80 GBs Serial ATA 8 MB buffer
ASUS E-616 DVD-ROM
450 watts ATX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 5.9 reference driver
NVIDIA Forceware 78.01 and 66.93 reference driver
NVIDIA NForce 4 6.66 reference driver
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit 5.12.1.512 driver.
DirectX 9.0c

The results:

We see a very different picture than if we were to use the built in timedemo tool. Unlike previous benchmarks scores, the Radeon X800XL is faster with AA and AF, simply running ahead of the GeForce 6800GT in this game. Of course, the image quality is somewhere between High Quality and Quality settings from the NVIDIA card, but the performance lead is significant - not bad. To be honest, any difference in image quality is not really noticeable in motion. All of these cards have enough pixel processing power to play this game with the highest detail with AA and AF enabled at the highest resolution.

	GeForce 6800GT				Radeon X800XL
	Quality		High Quality		Default
	Default	4x AA 16x AF	Default	4x AA 16x AF	Default	4x AA 16x AF
<30 fps	0	0	0	0	0	0
30-45 fps	0	0	0	0	0	0
45-60 fps	0	0	0	0	0	0
60-90 fps	1	1	1	2	4	4
90-120 fps	6	8	7	9	5	6

Here we can visually see how much frame rate we're losing with both cards. The GeForce 6800GT performance's is about the same under both Quality and High Quality settings (with only trilinear optimizations is enabled). With AA and AF (both aniso mip filter and sample optimizations enabled), we see a pretty big hit under High Quality settings. On the other hand, the Radeon X800XL does not lose as much (or gain as much) when AA and AF is enabled.

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