Although this card is capable of running 6x AA and 16x AF the other cards were not. Because of this I set all the cards to 4x AA and 8x AF so the settings would be even. I then re-ran the same benchmarks that were run with AA and AF disabled.
With Half-Life 2 the FPS were very close between this ATi Radeon X800 Pro and the Chaintech GeForce 6600GT. However, the X800 Pro did a little better than the 6600GT with all the resolutions. The AA and AF could easily be increased with this X800 Pro without taking a performance hit and improving the image quality significantly. As for the GeForce 5700 Ultra, well I think the numbers speak for themselves…
FarCry testing did not turn out like the Half-Life 2 testing. There is a larger margin between the X800 Pro and 6600GT cards, and with all three resolutions the X800 Pro came out on top. At 1600×1200 the X800 Pro is just about at the point where it would become un-enjoyable to play. I would suggest running it at 1280×1024 to make sure the FPS didn’t drop too low during a heavy scene. Again we see that the 5700 Ultra does suffer because of the level of AA and AF.
The benchmarking results for Unreal Tournament 2004 were very similar to FarCry. The X800 Pro did very well, as the resolution increased the other two cards fell behind. As I mentioned with the previous benchmarking because this X800 Pro is so powerful the added AA and AF does not affect the frame rate much. The AA and AF could both be increased for better image quality without sacrificing overall performance.
3DMark03 is a synthetic benchmark so I can’t say much for how it relates to real world gaming. However we can see that the X800 Pro is more than capable of holding it’s own even with the AA and AF increased. Compared to the other two video cards there is a significant difference in score with all three resolutions.
Like I mentioned before 3DMark05 requires a lot from a video card and this X800 was able to muster up that power. At 1024×768 all of the video cards were able to complete the benchmark, but with somewhat unimpressive scores, with the exception of the X800 Pro. At 1280×1024 the 6600GT failed while the 5700 Ultra and X800 Pro were able to finish it off. At 1600×1200 the benchmark would crash with the 6600GT and 5700 with the following error; “IDirect3DDevice9::CreateTexture failed: Out of video memory (D3DERR_OUTOFVIDEOMEMORY).” Because this X800 Pro has 256MB of memory it was able to complete the benchmark with a score higher than the 6600GT at 1024×768.
