Tomb Raider : Angel of Darkness

A series of grisly murders brings Lara into conflict with a sinister Alchemist from the past, and a secret alliance of powerful individuals shrouded in mystery. Accused of the murder of her one time mentor, Werner Von Croy, Lara becomes a fugitive on the run. Pursued by the police, she follows the Alchemist into a dark world of blood, betrayal and vengeance where it is up to her to defeat this unholy alliance, and stop them from unleashing their incredible powers on the world.

Angel of Darkness employs a brand new engine with Lara now made up of over 5,000 polygons as opposed to just 500 in previous Tomb Raider games. The range of special effects create a batch of cool visuals.

From the many kinds of water (mercurial liquid forms, good surface texturing, and realistic pools of water) to fire (heat blurs and colorful fiery pits), to the game's many light effects (lots of shadowing, multiple light sources and effective reflections), Core mixes more realistic settings with special effects to create a well-rounded whole. It is wothmentioning though that Tomb Raider: AOD uses pixel shader 2.0 technology on a higher extent than Halo does.

- Tomb Raider:AOD Benchmark

I recorder a timedemo on the Paris stage. The particular scene where the timedemo was recorder, is full with complicated fire effects. This benchmark stresses a lot the cards' pixel shading process and I believe it is the most stressful pixel shader 2.0 game benchmark.

We grabbed the fps from the timedemo twice. Once with the Anti Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering off (Trillinear was used instead), and once more with AA at 4x and Anisotropic Filtering mode enabled from the game's settings console .

Like in Halo here again the 6800Ultra is better than the X800 XT for only a couple of fps. Now let's enable those quality settings and see what happens.

Even the latest generation VGA cardshave a hard time to render this benchmark lowering their performance for about 30 fps. This is the lowest values seen for both 6800U and X800 XT cards and this makes this test one of the most requiring.