ATI Radeon X800 XL - A $299 6800GT Competitor
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 15, 2004 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Head to Head: X800 XL vs. 6800GT
The comparison that obviously matters most is the $299 ATI Radeon X800 XL vs. the $399 NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT (the regular 6800 isn't available in a PCI Express version for channel sales yet). The X800 XL will only be available as a PCI Express GPU while the 6800GT is available in both AGP and PCI Express versions. To ATI's credit, however, PCI Express 6800GTs are extremely hard to find while AGP versions are fairly common. In the end, we may just be comparing one unavailable PCI Express card to another, but in a perfect world where availability wasn't an issue, here's how the two would stack up in terms of performance:
You'll first notice that we added a handful of games to our test suite for this comparison - Need for Speed Underground 2, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (based on Valve's Source engine), NBA Live 2005 and Sid Meier's Pirates. The reason for expanding the test suite here was to present a broader scope of comparison between the two cards and to avoid only benchmarking games for which ATI/NVIDIA have optimized. Next year, we will have a much more thorough comparison of GPU performance across even more games, but for now, this will have to do.
All of the tests were run at 1600 x 1200, a resolution that both of these cards happen to handle quite well across all games. Our testing yielded the following conclusions:
- Half Life 2 is about 10% faster on the X800 XL than on the 6800GT (based on an average of our 5 demos). However, the other Source engine based game in our suite, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, shows the two GPUs performing rather similarly. With only two Source engine based titles, we cannot extrapolate any further based on these results, but they are interesting nonetheless. We will add that although the average frame rates were similar, the minimum frame rates were higher on the X800 XL than on the 6800GT in Vampire. There wasn't a huge difference, but enough to be noticeable during gameplay.
- Under Doom 3, the 6800GT is just under 30% faster than the X800 XL, a huge win for NVIDIA.
- Need for Speed Underground 2 has some serious issues on the 6800GT as it is almost 40% slower than on the X800 XL. While the X800 XL will play NFSU2 quite well at 1600 x 1200 with all of the details turned all the way up (AA off however), the 6800GT cannot. To have a $400 card and not be able to play the latest games at 1600 x 1200 at the highest detail settings is unacceptable in our opinion. This is an area to which NVIDIA needs to pay closer attention.
- Far Cry and Halo both favor the 6800GT with advantages of 12.5% and 10% respectively.
- The five remaining games basically performed identically on the X800 XL and on the 6800GT.
There's the performance comparison that matters, but if you want to see how the X800 XL fits into the grand scheme of things, the next several pages are the same benchmarks that we ran in our X850 review.
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Some Guy - Monday, February 13, 2006 - link
I'm satisfied with X800 XL card for playing the game America's Army, very smooth graphics even with 3D settings cranked up to the highest level at 1024x768 resolution. With my previous ATI All-In-Wonder 9600 XT AGP card the game was unplayable, I was "stuck in the matrix" so to speak even when no network lag present. I replaced with ATI All-In-Wonder X800 XL PCI-E, and now I get amazing results, great fun!I'm disappointed with the TV Tuner, ATI screwed things up big time. With my old 9600 AGP card I could repeatedly press the arrow up or arrow down keys on my keyboard to switch channels instantly with no problem. Now with my new X800 XL PCI-E card I press the arrow key and it takes 1 second before changing to next channel, then once it switched channel I lose sound for 1 second and then it come back to normal. Problem persists whether activating onboard audio or installing PCI Sound Blaster card.
With the X800 XL card I have to reboot my computer every time I want to open the TV Tuner, otherwise I get dangerously loud white noise in my headphones, around 110 dB I think. Considering the earing damage limit is 85 dB, are ATI trying to make my ears bleed or something?
While watching TV the image freeze frequently, the TV Tuner won't respond anymore so I have to reboot my computer. Also I must point out that I'm not dealing with a cheap no-name motherboard here. I'm using the ASUS A8R-MVP with the ATI CrossFire chip integrated onboard, this motherboard was supposedly designed specifically for ATI video cards, one would think they figured how to build stable drivers on their own hardware.
Don't bother with X800 XL if you plan on watching TV on your computer, this card is pure crap. Sure it does works fine for gaming, but this makes no sense, for a comparable price why not buy a better standalone graphic card specially for that.
Gerbil333 - Wednesday, February 9, 2005 - link
Perhaps the $299 price is correct. It may be a matter of supply and demand. Resellers could be making a huge profit on the cards they do have, and within a few months the prices will deflate to the correct MSRP. That's how it always goes. Or, maybe ATI changed their mind...deathwalker - Friday, February 4, 2005 - link
When are these flagrent B/S articles going to stop. I am tired of reading reviews on both Anandtech and Tom's Hardware based on mis-information and hear say. Lets get the research done properly before going to press!!...$299 my butt!!...at a minimum be more objective in your expectations concerning pre-release misinformation that these graphics card developers always love to pump you guys up with just to get you to hype there products....grrrrrbupkus - Thursday, January 20, 2005 - link
Here it is January 20th and the only store that lists the X800XL is Allstarshop.com for $449.Puuulease.
coolme - Sunday, January 9, 2005 - link
How did you guys measure the wattage of these cards?You guys did a review before : http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...
and the wattage numbers on both of the reviews don't look right at all... after all, the AMD processor case could only dissapate just below 200 watts.
T8000 - Saturday, December 18, 2004 - link
How about the 6800GT 128MB? That AGP card does sell for about $300 today and it seems to perform close to the 256MB version in todays games.So the available 6800GT 128MB should perform about the same as the unavailable X800XL.
TinyTeeth - Friday, December 17, 2004 - link
That HL2 runs slowly on FX cards doesn't necessarily mean that Valve intentionally wanted it to. I think it has to do with the failures in the FX design. I see no reason why Valve should optimize the game for DX8.1 graphics processors.GTMan - Thursday, December 16, 2004 - link
The graphs show the ATI part using more power but in the text you say ATI has the advantage in power consumption???quanta - Thursday, December 16, 2004 - link
Half-Life 2 should not be used for benchmarking. There is growing evidence that Valve crippled NVIDIA cards to make ATI cards to run faster[1]. Although this affects more to GeForce FX cards, the extra bandwidth incurred for using 32-bit shaders vs 16-bit could make a difference on frame rates. Regardless of who is at fault, unless the situation is resolved, Half Life 2 is deemed unsuitable for benchmarking purposes.[1] http://www.punkassfraggers.com/cgi-bin/datacgi/dat...
Executor6 - Thursday, December 16, 2004 - link
Good review. I'm particularly grateful for the inclusion of non-standard games like Bloodlines and Pirates. Most of the games I play do not have Doom or Half-Life or Unreal in their name, and its nice to be able to gauge the performance of a card in games that Nvidia and ATI have not bothered to optimize their drivers for.