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ATI Radeon X850 XT PE 256MB PCI-Express
Benchmarks: Half-Life 2
Thanks to Newegg for loaning us a Gigabyte 6800 Ultra 256MB PCI-Express video card to test for this review. Our Half-Life 2 benchmark consists of a timedemo we recorded in the airboat level. In this timedemo Gordon is in a boat and emerges from an enclosed area into a canal. He maneuvers through several obstacles and eventually comes across some enemies. Some Combine dropships fly by overhead and a couple of Combine soldiers on the ground fire their weapons. There is a lot of water in this scene.
All of the in-game graphical settings were set to high. The "Reflections" drop down menu was set to "Reflect All." Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were controlled through a batch file which changes the in-game settings. After the batch has finished running, the average frames per second for each test is output to a file. For each test, the timedemo was run three times and the results were averaged. One thing I'd like to mention before getting into the graphs is that the new trend has been to claim that a video card can be used for "HD Gaming," that is, High Definition Gaming... While it isn't exactly clear what HD Gaming really is, other than a fancy marketing term, we can assume that what is probably meant is the ability to game at very high resolutions. As it turns out, the highest resolution supported by these cards is 2048x1536, and the highest resolution that my ViewSonic P225fb CRT monitor is capable of displaying is 2048x1536. What a coincidence. So far I haven't seen any other reviews of this card which show benchmarks at the highest possible resolution, but I have decided to (in the games that permit, of course).
As expected, the X850 XT PE leads the way through most of the tests. The X800 XL 512MB performs on par with its 256MB counterpart at lower resolutions and AA/AF settings, but when you start to get into higher resolutions such as 1600x1200 and 2048x1536 and apply heavy AA/AF the 512MB card beats out the X850 XT PE by as much as 13fps! At 2048x1536 with 6xAA/16xAF, the only card that doesn't produce an error when the benchmark is run is the X800 XL 512MB, pulling off just shy of 40fps. I really must say that gaming at 2048x1536 is pretty amazing. Honestly, I had never really even tried to game at such resolutions, assuming that the video cards couldn't actually produce playable frame rates at these settings. Well, when it comes to gaming at the max AA/AF at the highest resolution, I was pretty much right, since the only card that was able to handle that setting was the 512MB card. However, you can see that the other cards are able to perform pretty well at up to 2xAA/4xAF at 2048x1536. If you have a monitor that can handle these resolutions, I suggest you give it a try with low AA/AF. It really looks amazing, even without AA/AF.
Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: The Card Page 3: Test Setup Page 4: Benchmarks: Half-Life 2 Page 5: Benchmarks: Doom 3 Page 6: Benchmarks: The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay Page 7: Benchmarks: Need for Speed Underground 2 Page 8: Benchmarks: Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Page 9: Overclocking & Conclusion 
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Add Comment
3 User Comments 1 - Posted by
PennyManDeux
on May 25, 2005 - 12:32 pm Awesome card. Can't wait to see what the next gen brings though. Of course I won't buy either until I have some more cash but you know... though can’t help but look at the benchies and dream of what might have been...
2 - Posted by
Kurtis
on May 25, 2005 - 12:38 pm it's a great card, but the price is just too steep for me to recommend it, especially when the next generation is right around the corner. i actually put the X800 XL 512MB back in my system for the better HL2 performance. I admit it, I'm a CS: Source junkie... /scratches lips 3 - Posted by
Guest
on June 16, 2005 - 11:40 pm Good Article, I am purchasing a new Dell computer and have used this article to help me make desicions. I appreciate the forecasting and am willing to hold on to my cash for the next gen cards out in the next 4 -6 months.
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