ATI Radeon X1800 XT & XL (page 7: Half Life 2, Doom 3)

Half Life 2

Without anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering, performances in the Half Life 2 scenes used here are “restricted” by the CPU and even at high resolutions. In this mode, the X1800 XL provides slightly lower performances than the X1800 XT, which is at the same level as the 7800 GTX. In AA 4x and Aniso 8x, ATI’s cards are in the lead, because even if the X1800 XL does not provide better results than the X850 XT PE, it is still comparable to the 7800 GTX. The X1800 XT is in the lead and is even close to the 7800 GTX SLI.

Doom 3

NVIDIA still dominates for Doom 3, even if we noticed a strong performance progression without AA with the X1800 XT compared to the previous generation. We initially thought that it came from this card´s massive bandwidth, but oddly this improvement fades away once AA is activated. Even worse, under these circumstances, the X1800 XT is only 10% faster than the X850 XT PE whereas the X1800 XL is noticeably slower. Because of the significant performance reduction due to AA activation, especially with the X1800 XT, we have to believe that there are still some possible optimisations via the drivers.