Radeon X800 XL Roundup

NFS: Underground 2
Publisher: Electronic Arts

Image Quality:

The Need For Speed: Underground 2 is a game that we've spent a long time playing through recently, we've used it here to represent a typical driving simulator - it's based on the DirectX 9.0 API, and makes use of lots of DirectX 9.0 features, including motion blur and light trails. Anti-Aliasing was controlled from inside the game, while Anisotropic Filtering was controlled via the driver control panel, as the game does not feature adjustment for Anisotropic Filtering.

We used a 3-lap race on the "Parkade Track 1" Street-X circuit with three opponents for our manual run through. The circuit is a fairly high-speed one, but contains lots of corners - it makes good use of motion blur and light trails.

It was possible to run both the Radeon X800 XL's and the GeForce 6800 GT at the same resolution and quality settings of 1024x768 4xAA 16xAF with maximum in-game quality settings applied. It was possible to gain a smooth gaming experience at a higher resolution with less Anti-Aliasing, but we found that 4xAA looked better than the higher resolution of 1280x1024 coupled with no Anti-Aliasing.

ATI Radeon X800 XL

NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT

We saw no visible image quality differences between the three Radeon X800 XL's and the GeForce 6800 GT. We felt that 1024x768 with 4xAA 16xAF looked a lot nicer than 1280x1024 with 0xAA 16xAF, but the lighting effects often left the car looking rather ugly due to the large numbers of jaggies that were present without any Anti-Aliasing.

Performance:

The Radeon X800 XL was slightly faster in this title, but not noticeably faster - both video cards delivered a smooth gaming experience at the best-playable setting that we have used, with the Radeon X800 XL edging it slightly. However, neither video card dropped below 30 frames per second, so both appeared to be very smooth, even when there was a lot of action on screen.