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1. Introduction

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2. Features

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Connect3D X800XT PE - 02 - Features

Main Features
GPU	Radeon X800 XT PE - R420
Memory Brand/Model	Samsung K4J5532QF-GC16
Memory Type	256 MB 256-bit GDDR3
Engine Clock Speed	520MHz
Memory Clock Speed	560MHz (1.6ns)
Memory Bandwidth	35.8 GB/sec
Pixel Pipelines	16
Shader Pipelines	6
Fill rate	8.3 Giga pixels /sec
DX Support	9.0
OpenGL Support	1.5
Output	VGA / DVI-I / D-Sub
Bus	AGP 4X/8X
Processing technology	0.13 micron

Connect3D's X800XT Platinum Edition is based on ATi's R420 chipset which is built using the 0.13 micron process. The card's engine clock ticks at 520MHz and the Memory clock at 560MHz, reaching the effective speed of 1.12GHz. The differences between the three available versions of the X800 can be seen in the table below.

	X800 PRO	X800 XT	X800 XT PE
Core(MHz)	475	520	520
Memory(MHz)	450(900)	520(1040)	560(1120)
Pipelines	12	16	16

You can see the only thing that seperates the XT PE from a simple XT version is the slightly higher clock speed.

The 256-bit memory bus on the X800, halves the amount of time the GPU has to idle in order to pass data back and forth to the memory. The 16 pixel pipelines inside the X800 engine, contribute to the card's great performance as the calculations needed for the very demanding games of our time will take much less time.

X800 Architecture

Also note that the card can operate in both 4x and 8x mode making it compatible with older motherboards.

3Dc

To understand what 3Dc does, we need to step into a brief discussion about normal maps.

You can think of a normal as an arrow pointing outwards from a surface at a 90 degree angle in order to quickly access its angle difference from different points of lighting.

First, a model with an extremely high polygon count is created (i.e 15000 polygons) and then one with less (1000 polygons) and that is the one that we'll eventually keep. Running a simple program calculates the differences between the two models and stores it as a normal map texture. Before rendering the final model in the game, the normal map texture is applied on the low polygon model and pixel shader instructions are used to compute real time lighting.

A quick example of Normal Mapping (not 3Dc!)

Normal mapping is greatly used in some of the most successful game titles of our days like Far Cry, Half Life 2 and Doom 3. However, the problem with Normal mapping is the great limitation to the texture size due to the lack of compression.

To get a peek at what would happen if none of the textures were compressed in a recent game, try Doom 3 and set the details to Ultra High. As suggested by Id Software, Doom3's publisher, the Ultra High detail level requires a graphics card with 512Mb RAM. In case you're not really into the graphics card market there is no card with 512Mb RAM, yet.

Such is the case with normal mapping. The current texture compression algorithms DXTC and S3TC are inapplicable on normal mapping textures as they produce block artifacts, so programmers usually avoid using them.

3Dc is the solution to this problem with an algorithm that splits up the texture into blocks. Then compressing each block, it is able to achieve up to 4:1 compression.

When using 3Dc you can get much better quality textures with the same performance from your card.

The bad thing about 3Dc is that we'll have to wait until the game developers incorporate it into their engines or release a patch that takes advantage of it. Ubisoft was supposed to be the first to include 3Dc support into their much awaited Far Cry patch 1.3. However, as we found out, there is no actual difference in the game despite the addition of the console command "EnableCompressedMaps".

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3. A closer look

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4. Test System

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5. 3DMark05

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6. 3DMark 2003

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Connect 3D X800XT - 06 - 3DMark 2003

3D Mark is a widely used and accepted benchmark that stresses the DirectX performance of a VGA card. A very strong point of 3DMark is that it's VGA card measuring is does not require any CPU power. So the resulting fps are a good reference a VGA card's rendering performance. For testing the performance of each card we used the 4 game benchmarks 3DMark has.

3Dmark03 also includes sound and CPU tests as well as some other feature tests.

- Game Test 1 - Wings of Fury (DX7)

This test is a combat flight simulator written for older hardware (DirectX 7). Particles are used a lot in this test - smoke and vapor trails, flak and gunfire, and explosions are produced using point sprites and quads.

 

 

 

- Game Test 2 - Battle of Proxycon (DX8)

This test is a simulation of first person shooter game types. 1.1 and 1.4 Vertex shaders are widely used since all character models are skinned using vertex shaders.This makes this test a good vertex shader comparison for VGA cards.

 

 

- Game Test 3 - Trolls' Lair (DX8)

This test should be the favorite of all RPG lovers. It is a cut scene of a female warrior facing two malicious trolls. Again the same vertex and pixel processing is used as in game test 2.

Mother nature represents the level of effects and realism that are possible using 2.0 vertex and pixel shaders, plus some other features that DirectX 9 offers.

 

 

 

 

The results from 3DMark03 at first glance differ from what we saw with 3DMark05. The X800XT's performance was worse on the first three games and that shows lack of power running DX7 and DX8.1 games. However, on Game Test 4 which is based on DX9 code, the ATI card took the lead by more that 10fps.

- 3DMark Official score

If you test your machine with 3DMark you can post the results at 3DMark' online result browser. For more information visit futuremark.com.

It seems X800XT's performance on the last game could not make up for the smaller framerates that the first few game tests. The card finished last in line but note that the differences between the scores are small and insignificant.

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7. Aquamark3 / 3DMark 2001

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8. Codecreatures

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CodeCreatures is a synthetic 3D benchmark that is a good reference for VGA performance comparison. This is a high-end 3D benchmark that also requires DirectX 8 hardware, making a good tool for measuring the potential of DirectX 8 game performance.

The Codecreatures benchmark is written with Microsoft's DirectX 8.1 API and incorporates the use of Vertex and PixelShaders popular on next generation 3D accelerators.

The benchmark plays a photo-realistic nature scene and calculates the performance of the graphics adapter by measuring the fps that it can display at 1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 resolutions.

 

 

-Codecreatures number

The codecreatures number is the resulting score of the total benchmarking process and is basically the geometric mean of the three framerates multiplied by 100.

The X800XT PE Connect3D card managed to surpass 8000 as the card seemed to do a great job of rendering Codecreatures virtual world under all resolutions.

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9. Half life 2

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10. Doom 3

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11. Far Cry

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Connect 3D X800XT - 11 - Far Cry

You are Jack Carver running your own boat charter business in beautiful Micronesia. With a past best left behind you, you'll be focusing on your present assignment: escorting an ambitious journalist named Valerie Cortez to the Island of Cabatu. It seems like a piece of cake, but you'll soon learn: paradise can be hell.

Farcry is an awesome First Person Shooter (FPS) based on a last generation 3D engine named as CryEngine. Real-time editing, bump-mapping, static lights, network system, integrated physics system, shaders, shadows and a dynamic music system are just some of the state of-the-art features that the CryEngine offers.

A great advantage and strong point of the CryEngine is its physics system which supports character inverse kinematics, vehicles, rigid bodies, liquid, rag doll, cloth and body effects. All physics seem to be very realistic and you never get bored when facing enemies, since character models have multiple animations that blend in believable ways.

With an integrated shader system and a massive terrain which maximizes the view distance to 2km, these features make Farcry a perfect action game and also a referable benchmark to speak of.

- Benchmark Settings

For this game we recorded a new demo from the start of the Rebellion stage. We chose an indoor scene in order to avoid being CPU bound under any circumstances. This will produce slightly higher results since it is also less GPU intensive, but we can't afford being stuck at 40-50 fps because of our CPU.

The latest patch (1.2) was used for our tests which updates the game's graphics engine to use the 3.0 Shader model. Unfortunately, this is supported for the 6800 series only.

The resolutions we run the demo under, are the following: 800x600,1024x768, 1280x1024 and 1600x1200. The first test was committed with Anti Aliasing (AA) and Anisotropic Filtering (AF) features off. In the second test we leveled up AA to 4x and AF to 8x. All tests were taken with Jack's flashlight on, to increase the game's requirements on the graphics cards.

The Connect3D X800XT PE seems an excellent choice for a game like Far Cry. It had no problems rendering up to the incredible rate of 150 frames per second under 1024x768 resolution.

Increasing the quality of the game with AF and AA, we get a drop of approximately 20% but the cards still hold the framerates at a satisfactory level even at the highest resolution.

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12. Medal of Honour Pacific Assault

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13. Thief 3

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Connect 3D X800XT - 13 - Thief 3

Instead of Deus Ex from now on we’ll be testing our cards using Thief 3. It’s based on the same engine but it’s much less GPU intensive and playable by more VGA cards than Deus.

The game makes severe use of Pixel Shader 1.1 instructions, the bloom effect and stencil shadows to achieve a wonderful result in your screen.

In the game you play the part of Master Thief Garrett who is back to rule out any evil forces using his unique stealth abilities. Deadly Shadows shows what stealth gameplay is all about. This game really gives you the feel of sneaking around and holding your breath when stuck in a sticky situation.

Since there is no official benchmark for the game, we’ll do our tests using a GPU intensive scene from the tutorial-level which we believe that represents the average fps you’ll get when playing the game.

 

 

 

All cards seem to face difficulties running this game. The framerates are really low and hardly acceptable at 1600x1200, even with performance beasts such as our X800XT and 6800Ultra.

Enabling 4x Multisampling and 8x Anisotropic filtering makes the game unplayable at high resolutions. The best compromise between quality and performance is running the game at 1024x768 (provided that your monitor is 17" or less).

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14. Colin McRae 05

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15. Ground Control II

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Connect 3D X800XT - 15 - Ground Control II

Ground Control 2 is an action-oriented game of tactics and warfare. As Captain Jacob Angelus of the Northern Star Alliance, you will command squads of infantry, artillery, and airpower against the might of the Empire of Terra. Base building and resource-collecting are replaced with unit control and combat tactics where your knowledge of the battlefield maneuvers will make the difference in your fight against a ruthless enemy. Position your troops on hilltops for better aim or inside buildings and forests for protection as you’ll need to use every inch of terrain to your advantage. Call in air strikes or assault pods to bring the battle behind enemy lines. Send out scouts to locate the enemy and use spotters for your artillery with the 360° free-roaming camera. Experience the total immersion of futuristic warfare as you lead your forces to victory!

 

For our benchmarks, we used the highest possible settings on the first mission of the single player game and moved around the camera to get an average framerate using fraps.

Ground Control II offers really impressive graphics without requiring much GPU power. Click on the picture above to view a screenshot from the game. Check out these excellent water effects!

 

All cards start out at 800x600 with similar performance as we're limited by our CPU. From that point on, the Connect3D card seems to fall behind the 6800's but still the framerate is kept at respectable levels.

The same situation remaing in this chart. Enabling Anisotropic Filtering and Anti Aliasing makes the cards lose more than 50% of their previous performance and the X800XT especially falls down to 32fps under 1600x1200.

 

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16. Overclocking

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Connect 3D X800XT - 16 - Overclocking

No matter your graphics card, there comes a time in your computer's life when it can no longer cope with the latest technology the ever so popular games use. This is one of the main reasons for overclocking your graphics card. Gamers are always looking forward for a little extra boost in terms of framerate. Even though most of the times the boost is far from noticeable, overclocking remains the last resort when you can't afford to buy a brand new VGA card.

Increasing the memory clock too much, produces the so-called "artifacts".

As we mentioned earlier, the default clock speeds of the Connect3D X800XT PE are 520MHz for the core and 560MHz for the memory. Using ATITool, we succeeded in overclocking the card to 535MHz and 600MHz (1.2GHz) respectively.

Let's see the impact this had with three of our most popular benchmarks.

The difference in the games varied from 2 to 7 fps. Surely nothing exciting, but if the card can handle it with its stock standard cooling, then every little performance gain is welcome.

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17. Conclusion

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Connect 3D X800XT - 17 - Conclusion

The performance of the Connect3D X800XT PE raises an issue. Is this card better than the 6800Ultra or not? The benchmarks are a bit confusing. Some favour the ATi card while others favour the NVIDIA cards. Here's a sumup:

3DMark05,3DMark01, Aquamark03, Colin McRae 05, Codecreatures, Far Cry, Medal of Honour all point to the X800XT, whereas Doom 3, Half Life 2, Ground Control II, 3DMark03 and Thief 3 to the 6800's.

You can see that with the majority of our benchmarks, the X800XT did much better than its competitors but we can't just ignore Doom 3 or Half Life 2. It's all up to you in the end and what you are looking for in a graphics card: generally great performance for the games to come or just excellent performance in a game or two of your choice.

The Connect3D X800XT PE costs around $500 (USD). Bringing that factor to the comparison against the 6800GT from Gainward ($550) and the 6800 Ultra from MSI ($600), we believe ATi earns some strong points.

To cut the costs to the minumum, we remind you once again that Connect3D includes no bundled software along with it's X800XT PE. Those of you who are looking for some bonuses when buying a graphics card, well this card is probably not for you.

Pros:
-Excellent performance with most of the games.
-Acceptable price for the average enthusiast.

Cons:
-No software bundle

Performance:
Value for money:
Overclocking:
Bundle: