Sapphire Radeon X1800 XL 256 MB Gigabyte GeForce 7800 GTX
Gigabyte GeForce 7800 GT
ASUS Radeon X850XT PE
3Dmark2005
The Radeon X850XT PE does stand out as
previous generation technology in 3Dmark2005 when compared
to these three new graphics cards. With no AA/AF enabled the
Radeon X1800XL is able to out muscle the GeForce 7800 GT,
but only by a very small margin. The GeForce 7800 GTX on the
other hand is slightly faster, as expected, scoring just
over 200pts more. The 4xAA/8xAF results see the Radeon
X1800XL fall 336pts behind the GeForce 7800 GT. The Radeon
X1800XL is, on the other hand, 1123pts faster than the older
Radeon X850XT PE.
3Dmark2003
Despite showing weak AA/AF performance
in 3Dmark2005 the Radeon X1800XL delivers much stronger
performance in 3Dmark2003. Although the Radeon X1800XL does
fail to out-perform the GeForce 7 cards with No AA/AF
enabled, the tables turned once these quality settings were
enabled. The 4xAA/8xAF settings place the Radeon X1800XL
just in front of the GeForce 7800 GTX and comfortably in
front of the GT card. The Radeon X1800XL was again over
1000pts faster than the older Radeon X850XT PE.
Battlefield 2
For some bizarre reason the Battlefield
2 performance does not seem to change all that much when
enabling the AA/AF settings on a Radeon graphics card. This
obviously has something to do with the ATi Catalyst drivers.
Normally this kind of thing would happen when the AA/AF
quality settings are not actually being used. However, the
game does look much better when they are enabled and there
is even a difference when going from 4x to 6xAA. The Radeon
X850XT PE is also only slightly slower than the Radeon
X1800XL, which is also very surprising.
Doom 3
Obviously NVIDIA based graphics cards
are always going to fair quite well in any game that uses
the Doom 3 engine. With No AA/AF enabled the GeForce 7 cards
storm ahead, killing anything marked with the ATi brand
name. However, turn on the AA/AF settings and things begin
to turn around. The Radeon X1800XL gets within a frame of
the GeForce 7800 GT, which is a massive turn around from the
No AA/AF test results. The Radeon X1800XL is also 9fps
faster than the Radeon X850XT PE with 4xAA/8xAF enabled.
