System Setup

    As for the specific demos used, UT2004 was a demo that I recorded of the Antalus level with a limit of about 15 frags.  The Far Cry demo is the default demo that Bench'em All uses.  With Half Life II I use the Canal-08 test from Anandtech as it provides both internal and external views in the test.  Doom 3 was the default timedemo that was included with the full game.  So lets see how the X700 Pro does, both at stock clock speeds and when overclocked, when we look at it compared to the older PCX5750 video card.

OpenGL Tests

    First we will start off with the synthetic and professional test, that of Spec Viewperf 8.0.  This test goes through about eight different tests to see how cards, usually professional OpenGL cards, do.  Our test will see if these consumer cards can still execute adequately in this arena.

    We can see that in most of the tests the newer X700 can either equal or beat the FX5750 card.  The tests where ATi excels are the UGS and Ensight tests, where they handily beat the nVidia based card, though that card is from the previous generation of cards.  What happens in a real game, Doom 3 how does the X700 do there?

    Doom 3 is one of the most graphically intense games released, and probably the best looking OpenGL game yet.  The demands this game places on your system is very high and even the most recent powerful cards still have trouble with this game.  So how does this middle of the road card do?

    The results here are what you would expect from going to a newer generation of video card, about a 3X performance increase at 1024*768.  This means this card is basically playable at this resolution, and you should be able to get through the game without any trouble what so ever.  You get a 10% increase in frame rate from the overclock of the X700 here, which isn't a bad increase.  What about when we turn on AA and ansiotropic filtering?

    We see the same basic graph as in the previous test, with the ATi based card about 4X faster than the previous generation card.  Simply put the older 5750 isn't really a competitor to this card, but can show what upgrading can do for those early adopters of PCI-E cards.  Overclocking the X700 shows that there was a little bit of CPU limitation in the previous test as there is a 14% increase in frame rates from our overclocking.  Now on to higher resolutions.

    We see the same results again, 3X faster than the older card and a good 15% improvement due to overclocking.  The difference is that this really doesn't mean too much as all results are under 30fps on average, which would probably be below a playable level for most people. 

    Here is where the X800/6600/6800 come into play.  At this setting the X700 slows down to a fast moving slideshow, nothing really playable here at all.  So we've seen that the newest OpenGL based game is playable on the X700 series, and especially on this card at any setting of 1024*768, what about Direct3D games.

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