ATI Radeon X800 XL - A $299 6800GT Competitor

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:

1. 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.
2. Under Doom 3, the 6800GT is just under 30% faster than the X800 XL, a huge win for NVIDIA.
3. 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.
4. Far Cry and Halo both favor the 6800GT with advantages of 12.5% and 10% respectively.
5. The five remaining games basically performed identically on the X800 XL and on the 6800GT.

If you ignore Doom 3, the X800 XL actually does fairly well against NVIDIA's 6800GT, equaling it in many games, outperforming it in Half Life 2, and coming within about 10% in Far Cry/Halo (while still being $100 cheaper). The problem is that Doom 3 is a pretty big blemish on the X800 XL's record that may or may not be indicative of future game performance depending on engine licenses. However, given the $100 reduction in price, we'd be willing to deal with lower Doom 3 performance so long as performance in other games remains competitive.

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.