by Josh Walrath

Game Impressions

     I did my best to play a wide array of games on the 6800 and the 9800XT, and they both performed very well in daily use.

Morrowind

     Even though this game is several years old now, it still has some very impressive graphics and is a hog on even a high end machine. The 6800, when set with 4x AA and 8x AF, gave amazing visuals in this game. I could see no rendering errors, and the framerates never dipped below 35 fps, even with the resolution set to 1600x1200. This game looked great on the GeForce, and it did appear slightly crisper on that card as compared to the 9800XT. The game rarely got jumpy, and it played very, very smooth.

Far Cry

     Due to the current issues with the 1.2 patch and ATI, I didn’t use this as a benchmark. I am sure that within the next few weeks Crytek will release a new patch, and ATI will have new drivers that will take advantage of the PS 2.0b codepath (for the cards that support this). Until then, I am just using this as a play test.

     The graphics look stunning on the 6800, and it does not suffer any of the graphical glitches when forcing PS 2.0 rendering throughout that the older FX series of cards showed. Everything played very smooth, and with 2x and 4x AA enabled, the gameplay rarely chugged while at standard resolutions. Once the resolution got to 1280x1024 and above, AA needed to be turned down to keep the framerates up. Far Cry loves cards with more than 128 MB of memory on it, and plays slightly better on 256 MB cards. At places the 9800XT had an advantage due to its greater amount of memory onboard, but these areas are not exactly common.

     Overall the 6800 provided an excellent card for this title.

Doom 3

     Only during the final stages of this review did I have the chance to play Doom 3 on this board. It runs very smoothly at 1024x768 with high quality settings enabled, 8x AF, and 2x AA. Very few pauses were noticed, and the overall experience was very positive. In another machine I use a X800 Pro, and I would say that the X800 is only slightly faster than the 6800, and both show about the same image quality. Of course the X800 Pro does have the advantage of more video memory, but the 6800 still is able to play this game at very acceptable rates and quality settings.

Misc. Games

     UT 2004, Battlefield 1942, Dungeon Siege, and several other older games are all loaded and every single one of them played fine. Battlefield does play best on NVIDIA, and the strange filtering bug that occurs with Radeon based cards does not exhibit itself on the 6800 (load up Bocage on a Radeon and fly around in an aircraft close to the ground, it appears as if the Radeon’s are only doing bilinear on this title). Dungeon Siege looked great and played well, but for some reason this title did not handle overclocking well. Everything worked fine once the card was reset to stock clockspeeds.

     There were no games that I found in my collection (that I had time to test) that caused a problem with this card. Everything ran very well, and they all ran very fast. The 6800 appears to be a very solid card for both new and old titles.

Overclocking

     Since this card is already overclocked, there may not be as much headroom as with other cards. Then again, since this board is already overclocked, perhaps the GPU on it is cherry picked from the 6800 batches and can overclock more successfully. I really don’t have the answer here, as this is my first 6800 that I have laid my hands on.

     Using the latest version of Powerstrip, I was able to take this card to 388 MHz core and 425 MHz DDR (850 MHz effective). This is not a minor overclock, and it is significantly faster than a stock 325 MHz 6800 with 350 MHz DDR (700 MHz effective). I took the most demanding test and saw what kind of effect it would have.

     With overclocking, there is a solid 9% increase in performance, and at that resolution, the overclocking enables performance right up there with the stock settings and optimizations enabled.

     Doom 3 did not show any visual artifacts at this speed, which is a relief since John Carmack says that Doom 3 will push a video card harder than most other games. The game did not crash or lock up once while using these speeds.

Next: Conclusion

 

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