The Radeon X800XL and GeForce 6800GT Compared - Part 2
PCI Express x16 graphics cardsChipset Radeon X800XL 256 MB, 256 bit, GeForce 6800GT 256 MB, 256 bit
In the first part (which you can read here), we looked at performance numbers from both the Radeon X800XL and GeForce 6800GT. We conclude that the Radeon X800XL is the better buy, because it delivers more effective anti aliasing and it consistently has less of a performance hit with AA and AF than the GeForce 6800GT. If you look at the numbers, you can see the GeForce 6800GT experienced quite a significant hit when AA and AF is enabled. However, this also means the GeForce 6800GT has a far higher fps than the Radeon X800XL when running without AA and AF. Normally, this would not be a problem, but if you're getting very low frame rates like we're getting in Brothers In Arms, you might want to consider running without AA and AF. In this situation, the GeForce 6800GT is the 'better' card. Why? Because it offers higher average and minimum fps, something essential for fluid gameplay. A difference of 4 fps may not seem much, but when frame rates are dropping below 30 fps, your gameplay will suffer so even a 4 fps difference is noticeable (and significant).
Out of our suite of benchmarks, only one game (Brothers in Arms) exhibits very low average frame rates on the Radeon X800XL (and the GeForce 6800GT). Of course, this have left us wondering, will we see a similar trend in newer games? New games like F.E.A.R, Quake 4, Serious Sam II and Call of Duty 2 are made with next generation graphics in mind, so they can very well behave the same way. If we look back, both new games in our benchmark suite (Brothers in Arms and Battlefield 2) is really only playable at 1024 x 768 with AA and AF or 1280 x 960/1024 without AA and AF. So, we're putting the cards to the test again in F.E.A.R, Quake 4 and Serious Sam II.
At the same time, there's a few other things we want to look at. For one, we've managed to get our hands on a faster processor: the Athlon 64 3500+. Both ATI and NVIDIA also released new drivers, the Catalyst 5.10 and Forceware 81.85. So, in addition to testing the new games, we took some time to re test our usual suite of benchmarks to see just how much performance these cards offer with a 400 MHz increase in processor clock and newer drivers.
F.E.A.R
Gamers everywhere are in awe of F.E.A.R, which is definitely the heaviest fps on the market today. Unless you have a pretty high end system, you're not going to see the full image quality this game has to offer. Unlike other games that uses timedemos for benchmarks, F.E.A.R uses a performance test, you could try to tweak your settings to find the best compromise between frame rates and image quality. Even if you have a GeForce 7800GTX (or perhaps lucky enough to get the X1800XL or X1800XT), chances are you have to made some compromises - it's that heavy.
We've spent some time trying different settings and see how well they translate into the real world. Out of the various settings available, there are three things of interest: volumetric lights, soft shadows and texture / video resolution. Soft shadows is definitely the heaviest performance hit, making it a good choice for benchmarking. Unfortunately, it won't work with AA enabled. Since the image quality impact is minimal to say the least, we opted to leave soft shadows off in our benchmarks - this way we can test the game with both AA on and off. The second heaviest feature is volumetric lights, we also opted to leave this to off. From the entire performance test, the only noticeable difference in image quality can only be seen in the very beginning of the test (where the lights are shining through the moving ventilation fan). This feature does work with AA and AF, but the performance impact is too heavy for both the GeForce 6800GT and Radeon X800XL. The last option we took note is texture / video resolution. We took some screenshots that you can see below, comparing each settings (minimum, medium and maximum).
You can definitely see both the medium and maximum screenshots have more detail than the minimum screenshots. However, medium and maximum differences are not easily noticeable - an acceptable image quality compromise. While maximum settings provide the best image quality, it's also very hard on the graphics card memory - we'll have to wait for 512 MB cards to play at maximum settings. Performance differences between minimum and medium is non existent, so why not choose the better looking option? We chose to set the rest of the settings to maximum. Not only does it look better (take a look at the water screenshots below), but a quick test shows that there are not performance difference between medium and maximum setting.
To avoid any benchmark results discrepancies we ran FRAPS and compare the results we got with the built in performance test tool. The results are identical, within 1 fps of each other. We also found that F.E.A.R performance test do tend to fluctuate by 2 to 3 fps (especially for the minimum and maximum fps), so keep that in mind when you're looking at the benchmark results. To keep it graphics limited, we set all system options to minimum.
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