New Gaming Boards Offer Breakthrough Performance

The new boards also feature faster memory, and lots of it. ATI's X800 XT Platinum Edition packs 256MB of 1.12-GHz GDDR3 memory, while BFG's GeForce 6800 Ultra OC includes 256MB of 1.1-GHz RAM. The boards, unsurprisingly, also carry high-powered prices: Both sell for $499.

The Speed You Need

Even demanding games such as Halo and Splinter Cell did little to slow down these boards in PC World's graphics benchmarks. Our production-level ATI X800 XT ran the tests at 67 and 80 frames per second, respectively, at 1600 by 1200 resolution. Our early preproduction version of BFG's 6800 Ultra OC was close behind, with frame rates of 65 and 77 fps, respectively. By comparison, older Radeon 9800 XT and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra boards averaged approximately 28 fps on Halo and 41 fps on Splinter Cell at the same resolutions.

In light of such similar performance numbers, as well as equally comparable subjective viewing tests, you'll have to decide between the new cards on the basis of features. ATI's X800 board, for example, takes up just one slot, compared with the two slots that BFG's 6800 Ultra requires. ATI's chip introduces some new technologies: temporal antialiasing, which smooths out jagged edges, and 3Dc, which will let developers of future games compress textures called normal maps to add detail to 3D objects.

Meanwhile, NVidia's GeForce 6800 Ultra supports the advanced DirectX 9 standard called Pixel Shader Model 3.0 (ATI supports 2.0). This lets the GPU run more-complex programs for processing data in 3D scenes, and allows developers to write more efficient code to better render effects like displacement mapping.

Most current and near-future games use PS 2.0, but NVidia claims that developers will be able to patch their games easily to use PS 3.0's additional capabilities.

Unfortunately, as of press time we weren't able to run either card with the highly anticipated next-generation games Half-Life 2 and Doom 3. Both titles should better test these cards' maximum capabilities. In the meantime, our current benchmarks indicate that either card would make a fine choice today.

Footnotes: ¹At 1600 by 1200 resolution and no anitaliasing.
²At 1024 by 768 resolution, antialiasing turned on.

How We Test:We use two PCs provided by Alienware, each with a 2.2-GHz Athlon 64 FX-51 CPU, an Asus SK8V motherboard, 1GB of DDR SDRAM, two 36.7GB Western Digital Raptor hard drives in a SATA striped RAID configuration, a Viewsonic PF790 monitor, and Windows XP Home. For performance testing we use the Halo, Splinter Cell, and Wolfenstein Enemy Territory games, the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo, and the Comanche 4 Benchmark demo. We measure frame rates at 1024 by 768 and 1600 by 1200 resolutions, both using 32-bit color. We also measure frame rates and perform a set of image quality tests with 4X antialiasing and 8X anisotropic filtering enabled at 1024 by 768 resolution at 32-bit color using Wolfenstein Enemy Territory and the Unreal Tournament 2004 and Comanche 4 Benchmark demos.

ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition

Polished single-slot board runs today's most demanding games; our top pick for graphics.
List: $499
Current Price (if available)