Radeon X800 XL Roundup

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay
Publisher: VU Games

Image Quality:

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is a new game published by Vivendi Universal Games, and it is based around the film, The Chronicles Of Riddick, which was released on DVD not too long ago. It makes use of the OpenGL API and takes advantage of DirectX 9 capable video cards. The game has many intense 3D features that have already been seen in Doom 3, such as dynamic lighting, normal maps, advanced per-pixel shading, and realistic shadowing techniques. Depending on what your video card is capable of, the game will auto detect what is the best Shader Mode for your configuration.

We controlled Anti-Aliasing from the driver control panel, while Anisotropic Filtering was controlled from inside the game. Thus, Anisotropic Filtering was left set to "Application Controlled" in the driver control panel.

The Radeon X800 XL's auto detected to Shader 2.0 mode - the highest Shader Model path in this title that the architecture behind ATI's R430 GPU supports. We found that 1280x1024 with 0xAA 16xAF, coupled with the Shader 2.0 path, delivered the best-playable image quality on the Radeon X800 XL's.

The GeForce 6800 GT defaulted to using the Shader 2.0++ mode, which adds soft shadows to the game's already impressive array of 3D features. However, this mode has massive performance implications, which we deemed to be unplayable, even at 1024x768. As a result of this, we lowered the Shader Mode to SM2.0 - the same mode that was used for the three Radeon X800 XL's - to allow the video card to deliver a higher best-playable image quality. We found that the best-playable settings for the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT were 1280x1024 2xAA 16xAF, but it was possible to achieve a good gaming experience at 1600x1200 0xAA 16xAF too.

Aside from the lack of Anti-Aliasing on the Radeon X800 XL, there were no differences in image quality between the two video card architectures. There is a lot of texture aliasing in this game, but enabling high levels of Anti-Aliasing did not cure this. We found that 2xAA was a good balance between jaggies and generally aliased textures that will not be cured by increased levels of Anti-Aliasing. The game also suffers from a moiréing effect - this happened on both video cards, and higher levels of AA and AF did not cure it either.

Performance:

Unfortunately for the Radeon X800 XL, it is not capable of keeping up with the GeForce 6800 GT in this title, with the GeForce 6800 GT delivering a better gaming experience. The only issue that we are worried about is the fact that the GeForce 6800 GT defaults to using the Shader Model 2.0++ path, which has massive performance implications - we were unable to achieve a smooth gaming experience at 1024x768 with no Anti-Aliasing or Anisotropic Filtering, which really displays how big the performance drop is when using soft shadows.

This title could be a big hit over the coming year - it certainly has the potential to be a big hit, despite the relatively poor film that it is based around. Thus, we expect ATI to improve its performance in this title over time. However, we feel that the title could go a similar way to Doom 3 - the title uses a stencil shadowing technique that just runs faster on NVIDIA hardware. There is nothing that ATI can do about that, and we are sure that the Catalyst team will look to close the gap as best as possible.