BitTech looks at 3 diff. X800PROs

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

Bit-Tech takes the Asus, MSI and Gag-n-Puke, er GE Cube for a Spin.

<A HREF="http://www.bit-tech.net/review/325/" target="_new">http://www.bit-tech.net/review/325/</A>

They borrowed a few of the cards so only put up against other retail cards on the market.

Nothing significantly different performance wise between the stock cards, which should be expected. The bundle seems to favour MSI (seriously who cares about a crap webcam ASUS!). Overclocking favouring MSI, on the core, strangely the GC gettng a little more out of the memory (not their usual result for the last Gen), and Asus pulling up the rear with a respectable OC.

Some interesting image comparisons, and suprising results considering the IQ comparisons of the previous generations. Interesting bugs uncovered as well from both side of the fence.


- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp <i>(or internet account)</i> ! - <font color=green>RED </font color=green> <font color=red> GREEN</font color=red> GA to SK

 

[uber_m0j0]

I thought his final words were interesting. He seems to think that the cards were bottle-necking on the athlon64 3800+. Doesn't it seem kinda impressive that the x800 is still being held back by that system?

~~ Windows Me: OS of teh MILLENIUM!

 

[HardWareBoss]

Nice babe on the Asus box and card. To bad it's a wimpy OCer.

 

[HardWareBoss]

Did you notice that Gag-n-Puke is using 2.0ns Samsung?

 

[entium]

don't they all use 2.0ns?

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

Well there were indications of that with the FiringSquad and Anadtech benchmarks.

Considering the progress of the graphics cards, I'm not really surprised. If you look at the Anand review which had AGP and PCI-EX cards head to head there were obvious situations where the latest P4EE was bottlenecking the X800XT and the GF6800U where they were returning exactly the same results, but when you switched to the AMD64 then it showed obvious and substantial differences between the two.

This in a way is the opposite of what we expected with 3Dmk03, but of course not all games are the same. The thing is whether or not things like AI, Mapping, multiple players/npcs, realistic environmental changes , communications, etc are CPU intensive, and of course if some of the machines use host resources for things like audio processing etc, you sunddenly get a bogged down computer because it has so many 'additional' features. It usually means a far better game (who wants crappy game AI?), but it does come at a price.

That the AMD64 shows itself as being a bottle neck and considering how much they are pushing P4EEs right now, it may give credance to the idea that multi-threading may be helpful in future games, especially if you can divide some of the functions.Unfortunately there is not mush push for multi-threading in games, Quake3 is one of the few games that really does benifit (that game has support for a whole ton of features, hopefully D3 does too), UT2K4 does support it, but from what I've seen the benifits are limited.

Like I said before, likely by the time we have games that take advantage of all that these graphics cards have to offer let alone strain them, the cpus will need to be serious advanced. Hopefully that gives a little futureproofing, but I wouldn't guess beyond the next generation of games.


- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp <i>(or internet account)</i> ! - <font color=green>RED </font color=green> <font color=red> GREEN</font color=red> GA to SK

 

[TheGreatGrapeApe]

I don't need babes on my boxes, I already have them in the Demos, although they can show me the boxes, ba-da-bump-bump-ching .

I really like the <A HREF="http://www.ati.com/designpartners/media/images/x600_black_1280.jpg" target="_new">Character on the X600 series</A>, another <i>EVIL</i> character. This time it's like the Evil Lacrosse player, or Evil Ski-Dooer or something.


- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp <i>(or internet account)</i> ! - <font color=green>RED </font color=green> <font color=red> GREEN</font color=red> GA to SK

 

[Vapor]

How about the Evil Shark-Hunter?

Maxtor disgraces the six letters that make Matrox.<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Vapor on 06/24/04 01:23 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[HardWareBoss]

I like the Shark hunter better. Send him down here I'll see if the Sharks are afraid of him.