Sapphire Radeon X800 AGP Review, Page Four

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Sapphire X800 AGP VIVO Review

Midrange Greatness?

by Scott Tammel

edited by Josh Walrath

Doom 3

For Doom 3 I simply ran the included “demo1.” On the 24^th of May a patch was released for Doom 3 but I had already completed benchmarks for it under the previous patch. I did install the patch but upon re-running the demos a few times that there was no discernable difference between versions. High Quality settings were enabled.

Demo 1 No AA/8AF	X800	9700 Pro
1024x768	42.33 fps	33.21 fps
1280x1024	35.51 fps	24.59 fps

In between the lower end specs of the host machine, and the fact that ATI does not perform as well in Doom 3 as NVIDIA’s cards tend to, these results are a bit low. Still, the X800 is a significant hop up from the 9700 Pro.

Demo 1 4X AA/8X AF	X800	9700 Pro
1024x768	31.79 fps	21.16 fps
1280x1024	22.76 fps	14.6 fps

Things slow down quite a bit for the X800 in Doom 3 once AA and AF are enabled. The X800 may not be the premier Doom 3 card, but with future driver releases (such as the 5.6 drivers) we can expect to see a healthy increase in overall speed.

Far Cry

In Far Cry two demos were used. One was a custom demo I made myself which is essentially me running through nearly the entire FORT level. The other demo I used is the Volcano demo that was included with the 1.2 patch.

Fort No AA/AF	X800	9700 Pro
1024x768	53.42 fps	40.52 fps
1280x1024	42.24 fps	33.89 fps
1600x1200	36.21 fps	23.63 fps

The X800 again proves itself to be a worthy upgrade to the 9700 Pro.

Fort 4X AA/8X AF	X800	9700 Pro
1024x768	35.3 fps	25.59 fps
1280x1024	33.21 fps	17.98 fps
1600x1200	29.75 fps	12.72 fps

Things would start to slow down quite a bit at 1280x1024 with 4XAA/8XAF on the X800. 1024x768 with this setting still felt fairly smooth. The 9700 Pro did not share that tendency though.

Volcano No AA/AF	X800	9700 Pro
1024x768	75.66 fps	56.59 fps
1280x1024	72.19 fps	37.62 fps
1600x1200	52.57 fps	24.03 fps

Unlike the Fort demo, Volcano runs significantly faster on each card. Unlike the 9700 Pro, the X800 remains smooth throughout. At 1600x1200, it more than doubles the performance of the 9700 Pro.

Volcano 4X AA/8X AF	X800	9700 Pro
1024x768	64.41 fps	31.06 fps
1280x1024	44.56 fps	20.54 fps
1600x1200	34.33 fps	14.21 fps

The differences really come out when 4X AA/8X AF are enabled. At every resolution the X800 was over twice as fast as the 9700 Pro. For the casual gamer the X800 is a significant upgrade from the 9700 Pro!

Next: Overclocking and Conclusion

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