Gaming Performance

Pentium 4 560 (3.6GHz), Gigabyte GA-VT880 Combo, 2x1GB Corsair XMS2 PC6400, Seagate 160GB Barracuda 7200.7, Realtek onboard audio enabled.

The games to be used for benchmarking are as follows:

Doom 3 v1.1

Battlefield 2

Far Cry v1.3

Unreal Tournament 2004 v3355

Half-Life 2

We'll be pitting the ATI All-In-Wonder X800XL up against the MSI NX6800 GT, which is equipped with 256MB of ram as well and falls at a similar price point. All testing will be done with default driver installations, set to quality, with AntiAliasing and Anisotropic filtering turned on and off as needed. Bench'emAll!'s default timedemos will be used to collect our scores but I will provide gameplay analysis as well.

All games were set to their highest allowable game settings unless otherwise noted. The latest chipset and video drivers at the time of testing were used for the tests.

Doom 3

The AIW X800XL falls behind the MSI NX6800 GT across all the settings. The difference isn't noticeable at 1280x1024, but the spread widens at 1600x1200 and when we enable the IQ enhancements.

The scores above mirrored our gameplay experience. I found Doom 3 to be very smooth at 1280, but noticed a bit of lag at 1600. Turning AA and AF on also impacted the gameplay, but since the game is so dark, I didn't really notice the "enhancements". At 1600, the 6800 GT provided smoother framerates and there was not much dropping of frames on the Enpro level.

Battlefield 2

At 1280, the scores aren't even close. The gap narrows at higher settings, but once AA and AF are turned on, the AIW X800XL turns the tables on the 6800 GT.

Actual gameplay hardly showed much difference. I found there was less pixelization with the 6800 GT, especially when viewing mountain sides, but otherwise performance and image quality were relatively equal. We'll have to go back and reinvestigate the whole ATI vs NVIDIA with 1GB vs 2GB soon as in terms of benchmarks, I'm a little wary of the differences at 1280.

Far Cry

Slight edge for ATI here, but the AIW X800XL takes the lead across all our test settings. Visually, Far Cry does indeed look nicer; i.e., more "3D" thanks to SM 3.0 support on the 6800GT. The AIW X800XL still looks good, and the lack of SM 3.0 support does not detract too much from the experience. In terms of the "feel", both cards felt the same for performance.

Unreal Tournament 2004

I think the results speak for themselves. Both cards are dead even here. The gameplay reflected this as both cards are more than enough to handle this older title. We'll see if this changes with the next version of Unreal Tournament.

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