MaximumPC 2004 06

380 MAXIMUM PC JUNE 2004



EEXPERIMENTS WITHXPERIMENTS WITH

Which Is Faster: nVidia’s

GeForce 6800 Ultra or

ATI’s Radeon X800 XT?

The test : Last month, we introduced

nVidia’s next-gen part, formerly known

as NV40: the GeForce 6800 Ultra. This

month, we pit that nVidia card against

an early version of ATI’s next-generation

part—the Radeon X800 XT—to see which

next-gen part is faster. Because this is

the Speed issue, we’re only concerned

with one attribute: raw, unadulterated

speed. We care not about visual quality,

feature support, size, and noise level—

that’s another story. All that matters is

frame rate.

To test the next-gen cards, we used

every game we could get our hands on

that uses programmable shaders. Now

that we finally have some next-gen titles

that use DirectX 9 programmable shaders,

we’ll be damned if we don’t put them to

use. We tailored our tests to be equal parts

real-world performance measurements

and synthetic benchmarks.

Our benchmarks were the standard

Halo time demo at 1600x1200, Far Cry at

1280x1024 (Very High quality with water

set to Ultra High), Unreal Tournament 2003

Flyby at 1600x1200, Aquamark3 at default

settings, 3DMark2003 at default settings,

and 3DMark2003’s Pixel Shader 2.0 test.

For games that don’t include a benchmark

utility, we used Fraps (a third-party frame

rate counter) and tested the frame rate

while we walked forward in-game for a

minimum of 35 seconds.

The results: The ATI Radeon X800 XT and

the GeForce 6800 Ultra each have 16 pipe-

lines and it shows. (The previous-genera-

tion Radeon had eight pipelines, and the

last-generation GeForce had just four.) On

many of the tests we ran, both the Radeon

X800 XT and the GeForce 6800 Ultra ran

twice as fast as the Radeon 9800 XT—the

fastest last-gen card!

So it goes without saying that both the

GeForce 6800 and Radeon X800 XT spank

the older generation of graphics cards, but

what you really want to know is how they

compare with each other. Should you buy

ATI or nVidia? The benchmarks split evenly

down the middle, but you’ll notice that

the ATI card wins all the real-world tests,

while the nVidia card wins almost all the

synthetic benchmarks. This bears closer

examination.

Despite a slower core clock speed,

the nVidia card has a few advantages.

With slightly more memory bandwidth

and an additional pixel shader unit in

each pipeline, the GeForce 6800 purrs

through tests that emphasize shadow

volumes. Also known as stencil shadows,

nVidia added the extra pixel processing

units to greatly accelerate this effect.

An example of a game that uses this 3D

effect is Doom 3 , which uses shadow

volumes to render the amazingly realistic

shadows you’ve seen in screenshots.

Coincidentally, 3DMark 2003 Game 2

also makes extensive use of this 3D

effect. The GeForce 6800 Ultra’s domi-

nation over the new Radeon in Game

2 leads us to believe it will be the best

card for Doom 3 —assuming, of course,

that the game actually ships in the next

six months.

Looking at the rest of the benchmark

results, however, the situation isn’t as cut

and dried. Although the X800 does win

most of the real-world tests—we’ll talk

about Halo in a second—it wins by just a

few percentage points. In Far Cry, which

makes the heaviest use of programmable

shader technology that we’ve seen to

VIDEOCARD PERFORMANCE GEFORCE 6800 ULTRA RADEON X800 XT X RADEON 9800 XT

Halo 1.02 (fps) 35.03 59.75 28.1

Far Cry 1.1 (fps) 62.0 65.8 53.0

UT2003 Flyby (fps) 261 275.5 127.3

Aquamark3 63,536 63,487 45,857

3DMark2003 Game 2 95.0 88.5 45.0

3DMark2003 Game 4 62.8 71.2 37.4

3DMark Pixel Shader 2.0 Test 156.4 121 57.2

3DMark 2003 Overall 11,833 11,437 6,563

Best scores are bolded. All tests are run on our standard test bed system, an Athlon FX-51 on an nForce3 150 motherboard with 1GB of RAM.

3DMark and Aquamark3 are run at their default settings. UT2003 and Halo are run at 1600x1200. Far Cry is run at 1280x1024.

SPECS GeForce 6800 Ultra Radeon X800 XT

Core code-name NV40 R420

Core clock 400MHz 500MHz

Memory type DDR3 GDDR3

Memory clock 550MHz 500MHz

Number of transistors 220 million 170 million

Number of pipelines 16 16

The ATI Radeon X800 XT—formerly

code-named R420—is ATI’s next top-

of-the-line part. It sports 16 pipelines

and a whopping 500MHz core clock.

The newest card from nVidia—the GeForce

6800 Ultra—has 16 pipelines, but it also

includes some special hardware to ratchet

up performance in games with stencil

shadows, such as Doom 3.