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DriverHeaven Article |
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X800XL compared with Geforce 6800GT In future reviews we will be using “The Project” as one of our standard tests of graphics card capabilities, however due to time limitations it wasn’t included in our X800XL review. We had some free testing time over the last week and have ran the demo on both the 6800GT and X800XL to ascertain how they should perform in future Crytek(/Cryengine) releases. Test System: ATI Radeon X800XL 256mb Asus A8N-SLI Windows XP SP2 The test system was built from scratch, a format of the hard drive was performed (NTFS) and then Windows XP was installed. Following completion of the install the Nforce drivers were installed. The only updates applied were SP2 and .net framework 1.1 (latest service pack). Following a reboot the Video Card drivers were installed. Next the benchmarking tools were installed and finally the hard drive was de-fragmented. For all tests the ATI/Nvidia drivers were set to default quality/optimisations (unless otherwise stated) Good Benchmarking Practice: Before we look at the performance of both cards we need to look at a few IQ/Performance issues experienced with at least the last 4 sets of forceware drivers. The first issue involves the loading of the demo. On our test system the first attempt to load the demo after a driver install resulted in the demo crashing to desktop, and on one driver the machine hung and had to be rebooted. If you immediately run the demo again it does load successfully. There is however a caveat to it loading successfully… …when a Geforce 6 series card is installed in your system the load times for the demo are incredibly long, approximately quadruple those of the same system with a Radeon installed. When testing the demo over and over it becomes frustrating to deal with. Hopefully this issue will be resolved when games using the latest Cryengine enter retail. The display issues we mentioned above we shall split into two main sections, the first is blur and the second is water/objects. BLUR (depth of field):
As you can see the left hand side of the figure is very blurred on the GT when it should be in focus. To the right of the characters head you can see the outline of a focused area of trees which should be his head in focus. This happens throughout the demo where blur effect is used (almost every scene). WATER/OBJECTS:
In both sets of the above screens you can see that there are missing water effects, also the sail is incorrectly rendered in both GT screens. Both issues can affect the speed the GT renders the scene. With all the issues above combined running The Project is far more enjoyable on ATI cards, so much so that at this time it’s not really worth the download of the demo if you have a Geforce card. We know that the water issue at least can be fixed as if you falsify the device ID of the Geforce to another card it improves the rendering - so the capability is there. We contacted Nvidia about the issues to find out when the above issues would be fixed and a driver (beta or WHQL) available to end users. Adam Foat in Nvidia UK PR let us know that the bugs have been fixed internally though there is no set date for that driver to be made publicly available. So that’s the IQ issues out of the way, on to the
performance…remember though that the 6800 rendering
issues may affect performance.
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