Radeon X800 XL Roundup

Half-Life 2
Publisher: Valve Software

Image Quality:

We are using the full retail version of Half-Life 2 with the latest patch downloaded and installed via the steam network. We did a manual run through from a section of City 17 in the “Follow Freeman!” Chapter for the purposes of our comparison. As a backup to verify that the settings were playable, we used a section of “Water Hazard” to determine that the chosen settings were playable when water was being rendered to screen; however, a frame rate was not recorded for this section of the title – it was merely a loop back to ensure that our settings were playable in the most graphic-intense parts of the game.

Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering were controlled from inside the game, and thus the drivers were left set to “Application Controlled”.


All four video cards that we have tested here – the three Radeon X800 XL's and NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GT – all delivered a smooth gaming experience at 1600x1200 2xAA 16xAF with maximum in-game detail settings; this included using the ‘Reflect All' water detail setting. Since our Half-Life 2 evaluation, both ATI and NVIDIA's driver teams have been working hard on improving the performance in the most popular title of 2004 – the title doesn't show any signs of sales dropping at the moment, and we feel that the title will remain an important title for both video card companies for a good while yet.

ATI Radeon X800 XL


NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT


Aside from the differences in Anti-Aliasing, there are no clear differences that can be seen between the image quality delivered by the either ATI or NVIDIA's drivers.

Performance:


The two different video card architectures handle this title quite differently, with the three Radeon X800 XL's delivering an average frame rate that was over 20% faster than NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GT. However, the interesting thing is that it could be argued that NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GT delivered a smoother gaming experience, thanks to a minimum frame rate of 30 frames per second - this meant that the GeForce 6800 GT delivered a silky smooth gaming experience that can not be grumbled at.

The three Radeon X800 XL's all delivered a minimum frame rate of under 25 frames per second in our manual run throughs - the best case of the three managed a minimum frame rate of 25 frames per second. While this was still smooth, the minimum frame rate meant that there was a brief stutter where the frame rate dropped below 30 frames per second. When we tested the Radeon X800 XL's on our second 'loop back' area, we found that it delivered a higher minimum frame rate than the GeForce 6800 GT; however, we feel that both video card architectures delivered a more than acceptable gaming experience in this title, and recording minimum frame rates in this title proved to be an important measurement of real-world performance as is always the case in our video card evaluations.