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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Questar - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link
Hey nVidia fanboys that want to compare this card to a 6800NU.How bad do you want to lose? That's a 12 pipe card.
flexy - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link
21:>>>
The only silicon parts available for my system are the AMD 3500+ and OCZ Platinum memory.
>>>
same here :)
flexy - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link
#16:>>>
Another famous hardware review site with the name tom in it has taken a stand for several months now, refusing to review non-existing products. You should elevate yourself to their level in that regard; everyone will respect you for doing so.
>>>
i might agree with you there !
This reviewsing of non-existant products ALSO will greatly contribute to the price-hiking which we see right now. X800XT PE card for $899, anyone ?
Also...recent reviews (eg: Nforce 4) VARIOUS sites, not only AT, reviewed it based on Beta bios which did NOT even yield information about
STABILITY
OVERCLOCKABILITY
PCI-LOCK YES/NO
all these reviews were based on such early products that for the enthusiasts it still remains to guess whether these products actually meet their expectations.
IRONOCIALLY, people seem to be willing to spend $350 on MSRP $180 boards (say: ASUS NF4 SLI)....not even knowing whether these boards, for example, would even be capable of providing a stable FSB/HTT over 217. (If you want these boards to overclock).
From this point of view these reviews are really *worthless*. I could get the same information off a nvidia press-release, just reading the advertized specs.
Aquila76 - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link
These friggin' paper launches are killing me. I want to build a nForce4 SLI with twin 6800GT's. I was hoping to have some of my wishlist of parts 'Christmased' to me, but looks like that ain't gonna happen. The only silicon parts available for my system are the AMD 3500+ and OCZ Platinum memory. What's the point of there's nothing to plug them into?My other question on this is how are these companies keeping on track for their fiscal projections if they have no available new products?
Keyser0804 - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link
How come they did not compare it against the 6800 vanilla? Isn't that the competitor or am I missing something?Momental - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link
Has ATi ever given a reason as to why their cards are in such short supply? Is it really just a matter of, "the demand far exceeded our production schedule!"? It's not like they, or nVidia, are new to the whole phenomenon of people like us clammering for their product.It just seems as if this time around, both companies have completely dropped the proverbial ball when it comes to making GPU's available to us. Susan, back over to you in the studio. :)
cnq - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link
Yeah, you're right. But the tom folks at least kept their original stand, which was not to review the nvidia 6200 when it was paper launched.LoneWolf15 - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link
Note that the "famous hardware site" that took the stand is reviewing the same ATI products today...and like Anandtech, they left the vanilla nVidia 6800 off the benchmarks.It seems that everyone who wishes to "take a stand" does so with words...but their actions fail to back them up.
cnq - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link
Anand,Congrats on your intro. It's ABOUT TIME you took a stand against paper launches. But then, you didn't take a stand, did you? You still did the review on a non-existent product, with bugs everywhere (couldn't overclock). This does the buyer absolutely no good.
Another famous hardware review site with the name tom in it has taken a stand for several months now, refusing to review non-existing products. You should elevate yourself to their level in that regard; everyone will respect you for doing so.
DeathByDuke - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link
X800 at $200/£170-200. killer. specially GF6600GT killer... be prepared to watch 9800 Pro/XT prices skydive when AGP X800 comes out in Jan (a few other sites stated that fact). most are still near £160-200. oh, yeah, I bet nvidia panic price drops as a response if they _did_ cancel NV48. If they didn't, well.... gotta love compettition ;)