Radeon X800 XL Roundup

Apples to Apples

After numerous discussions, both internally and externally, we decided that adding an apples-to-apples section of the review would be beneficial to those readers who still die for finding the fastest card at a resolution that may well not be 100% playable. Most TFT owners are limited by resolution anyway, with both 17" and 19" panels having native resolutions of 1280x1024, and thus cannot increase their resolution to 1600x1200. These settings are not meant to be deemed 'best-playable' like the main section of the review, but more of a quest for speed with Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering set to 4x and 8x respectively.

Doom 3

We have mentioned on many occasions that Doom 3 does not benefit from Anti-Aliasing as much as it does from increasing the resolution. However, TFT owners are often limited by resolution which can mean that the whole purchasing choice could change completely.

These settings are far from smooth, but you see that the Radeon X800 XL actually closes the gap between itself and the GeForce 6800 GT. ATI are renowned for their very efficient Anti-Aliasing algorithms, and with 4xAA enabled, the Radeon X800 XL actually gets very close to the GeForce 6800 GT in this title.

Half-Life 2

Half-Life 2 is a title that does benefit from using at least 2xAA at whatever resolution you are running at - some of the jaggies can get very ugly if our minimum recommendation of 2xAA is not applied.

Much like with our 'best-playable' manual run throughs, the Radeon X800 XL is a long way ahead of the GeForce 6800 GT in terms of frame rates. Again, ATI's 4xAA appears to be that little bit more efficient in comparison to NVIDIA's - 2xAA seems to be the sweet spot for NVIDIA's video cards. In some cases this is adequate, but in others it may be far from acceptable image quality. The Radeon X800 XL delivered a 100% smooth and pleasurable gaming experience at 1280x1024 4xAA 8xAF, while the GeForce 6800 GT was slightly laggy at times.

FarCry

FarCry can often benefit from Anti-Aliasing, but it is not as necessary as in Half-Life 2 - there are many sections of FarCry that are based in the jungle, where Anti-Aliasing is not a necessity. These two video cards delivered best-playable image quality at lower settings than we have used in this apples-to-apples comparison.

We see a similar story in this title too. ATI seem to have worked hard on optimising 4xAA 8xAF, and the settings are not too far away from playable on the Radeon X800 XL. We would say that 4xAA 8xAF is quite possibly one of the most common settings that fellow reviewers use to benchmark; however, 4xAA 8xAF is often not playable at a high enough resolution on the video cards in question.