HIS Radeon X800GTO IceQ II iTurbo

Rome: Total War

Publisher: Activision

In this comparison, we used the full retail version of Rome: Total War, and we've used part of the tutorial battle to record our manual run through. Our test section incorporates several unit movements along with a lot of units in the scene at the same time - it manages to provide a high level of stress on the video card because of the high polygon and geometry counts.

The driver control panel was used to control Anisotropic Filtering, while we left Anti-Aliasing set to "Application Preference" in order to control AA using the title's in-game graphics settings.

Below is a table of the best-playable settings that we found best for each video card configuration. The title is an RTS, so frame rate isn't quite as critical as it would be in a first person shooter, so we have aimed for 15 frames per second minimum and an average frame rate of 40 frames per second.

The HIS X800GTO was again the fastest video card that we have evaluated in this review. When we enabled iTurbo mode, we were almost able to use the maximum detail settings for the game at 1024x768 2xAA 8xAF. The only detail that we had to hold back on was vegetation detail, which we set to medium. We were really impressed with the image quality that this mid-range video card was capable of in this rather intense RTS.

When the card was operating at its default clock speeds, we had to drop the details a little. We found that we had to drop the unit scale from "huge" to "large" and also drop the unit detail from "highest" to "high". We were still able to maintain the same Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering options, though.

Both the XFX 6800 Std and 6600 GT Extreme Gamer performed best at 1024x768 2xAA 8xAF. Unit scale was set to "large", terrain, effects and vegetation detail were set to "high" while all of the remaining detail settings were set to "medium".

With the HIS X800GT, we had to lower the Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering settings a little, but the in-game details remained the same. We found that the video card was fast enough to enable 2xAA too, but we experienced horrible display corruption and tearing. We tried two different X800GT's and had the same problem with both of them. Rather strangely, we didn't experience these problems in any other game or with the HIS X800GTO. On the positive side, the game was very smooth and the image quality was pretty good, despite the lack of Anti-Aliasing.