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ATI Radeon X800 XL - A $299 6800GT Competitor

 by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 15, 2004 9:00 AM EST
45 Comments | Add A Comment
45 Comments

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.

System Level Power Comparison Half Life 2 Performance
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  • Keyser0804 - Thursday, December 16, 2004 - link

    I just thought the 6800nu should be compared because of the pricing, even if it is a weaker card. Nividia will probably drop prices to compete, right?

  • DS Delaroca - Thursday, December 16, 2004 - link

    im yet to see an ATI/Nvidia high end card on the shelf or online for the 499.99 to 599.99 if at all, this paper lauch crap needs to stop its misleading and LUDACRIS.

  • DS Delaroca - Thursday, December 16, 2004 - link

    who cares about doom 3, i care more about real games like Far Cry, HL2 and EQ2, doom3 was to me nothing more than just a demo, besides i have not see any companies picking that engine for next gen. games, i have see people talking more about HL2 and the unreal 3 engine than D3.

  • Filibuster - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link

    >Anand, thanks for the great review.... Do you have any knowledge or hints as to when the pci-e 6800gts are going to start showing up in more volume?

    I second that!
    Please look into this!
    If its something you can't say then at least say that you can't say. :)
    Thanks.

  • Gaia Hunter - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link

    6800nu and 6800LE are excellent choices for those AMD users that want to wait for PCI-e motherboards for AMD, without wasting $400+ in a card that will after be obsolete (AGP 6800GT/ULTRA and AGP X800PRO/XT).

    Those users will also have a good choice of being able to unlock their cards to 16/6(pipelines/vertex) in a Vanilla or 12/5 in a LE (some get 16/6 also in LE).

    Those that cant unlock, will generally be able to do some good overclock, unless they're extremly unlucky and got a very bugged "ULTRA" core!!!!!

  • mczak - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link

    isn't the 6800nu more a competitor to the X800 than the X800XL? The 6800nu is usually just slightly faster than a 6600GT, ans since the X800 beats the 6600GT, it ought to be a close call performance wise (other than doom3). IIRC the 6800nu is downgraded compared to 6800GT pretty much the same as the X800 compared to X800XL is (128MB instead of 256MB ram, ~70% memory clock, ~3/4 pixel fill rate).

  • DerekWilson - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link

    As per the vanilla 6800, we had not been able to find a PCI Express 12 pipe card either from a vendor or on the street until now.

    This week we noticed one on newegg from MSI for $339. That's the only one we've seen, and we haven't gotten any in our labs yet. Last week, there weren't any to be had in the USA for as much digging as we did.

    With the new pricing and knowing the performance of the 6800 GT vs. the 6800, one can extrapolate that the X800 XL will certainly out perform the 12-pipe 6800 part in price and performance. Our recommendation (if the X800 XL sees the light of day) will be with the ATI part at $299 if the standard PCIe 6800 cards available today stick at $40 more.

    On the AGP side, ATI won't talk about what they are and aren't bridgeing back until they finish their bridge. We won't know if the vanilla 6800 AGP is safe at it's $275 street price until we hear more on that front.

    Thanks,
    Derek Wilson

  • ViRGE - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link

    #20, they can't compare it to a 6800NU because they don't have a PCIe 6800NU, it doesn't exist yet. This is a PCIe-only test, so everything tested needs to come in a PCIe variety.

  • shabby - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link

    Very nice, but pci express my ass, the x800 is agp based sp why did they switch to pci-e?

  • Questar - Wednesday, December 15, 2004 - link

    >>>
    Unfortunately, we could not test the overclockability of our X800 XL sample as none of the available tools would recognize, much less allow us to adjust the clock speed of the GPU
    >>>

    Didn't have a copy of Powerstrip around eh?
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