Looking Back Pt. 3: The 6800 Ultra, ForceWare, and the Future
by Ryan Smith on May 11, 2006 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
X2: The Threat
Our other favorite non-FPS game, the space-habitation game X2 is a good look at what happens when environments are of secondary importance to a handful of high-quality models. With a great deal of shadowing and pixel shading, X2 can weigh down a system pretty hard at points even with its age.
Other than a frame here and a frame there, there is no significant change in performance in X2, in line with what we saw previously on the X800 Pro. At over 70fps even at our HQ settings, though, we're not surprised NVIDIA didn't bother with any optimizations.
ForceWare 60.72 versus 84.21
Mouse over for 84.21
Once again, the lack of performance optimizations and the lack of a change in image quality go hand-in-hand.
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LoneWolf15 - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
Currently they are, yes. But some years back, they sucked.That's true. However, "some years back" is around the time of the Radeon 8500, far before the 9xxx line or the X800 line. This issue is no longer relevant, and yet people who haven't used ATI cards in years flog this dead horse over and over again.
ATI isn't perfect; their multimedia cards (i.e. TV tuners) still need work in the software department. However, it's been a long time since ATI has had serious driver issues, and many who haven't had an ATI card since Rage128/Radeon/Radeon 8500 days talk as if things haven't changed.
Powermoloch - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
I've been using Ati's drivers for quite sometime, and I noticed a gradual increase of performance from my experience. Especially on the 3dmark scores lol.MrKaz - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
What’s the problem with Control Panel?I like it a lot. Ati drop it in 5.11, I keep it installed with driver 6.4 and have no problems.
poohbear - Thursday, May 11, 2006 - link
have u even owned an ATI card? i'm currently running a 6800gt, but my experience w/ the 9800pro was great and i dont know what u're talking about w/ your driver instability comment. maybe u should read the article again, it praises ati's driver team quite a bit.