Ready For The Winter Games: ATI Radeon 9800 XT

X2 Rolling Demo

This demo/benchmark comes from Egosoft and demonstrates their upcoming game X2 - The Threat. Although the game does not use any Pixel Shaders, it offers a very stunning graphics quality. Egosoft uses real time stencil shadows with high-res textures and Dot3 Bump Mapping. You can find out more about it here .

In X2, the FX5900 Ultra takes the lead. One explanation for this could be the Ultra Shadow capabilities of the NV35 that allows it to render stencil shadows in a single pass while other cards need two passes. X2 makes heavy use of stencil shadows.