Connect3D X800XT PE

Review Pages

1. Introduction
2. Features
3. A closer look
4. Test System
5. 3DMark05
6. 3DMark 2003
7. Aquamark3 / 3DMark 2001
8. Codecreatures
9. Half life 2
10. Doom 3
11. Far Cry
12. Medal of Honour Pacific Assault
13. Thief 3
14. Colin McRae 05
15. Ground Control II
16. Overclocking
17. Conclusion

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.

This test also uses post-processing effects, such as Depth of Field and Bloom effects which are widely used in today's game cut scene sequences.

- Game Test 4 - Mother Nature (DX9)

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.