6800 Ultra or X800XT ?

astrofool

When price and power don't come into it, which one ?

I know myself, I will probably go for the 6800 at this stage, if only, as Matt Simms said in another thread, that it is based off new tech, rather than an old tech rehash.

My last three cards have been gef3ti, gef4ti, rad9800xt, and right now, any new pc I build will usually have a 9600 in it, so barring all the zealots, which is gonna be better ? Only thing that worries me about the 6800 is gonna be hl2 performance.

Azza

Just gonna recap on what I have heard.

The X800XT will run direct X games better while the geforce 6800ultra will run the opengl better (its clearly the card for doom III). The X800XT seems to be the faster card overall while the Geforce 68000 will support new technologys like pixel shader 3.0...but that isn't too important yet. The geforce will probably overclock better and would be a better card to go for if you run linux.

Overall If I do decide to get one I will probably get the X800XT overall I still believes it offers the best performance around. If you get either of these cards there gonna rock at Half life 2 and doom III unless you running at insanely high specs like 1600x1200 with 16xaf and 6xaa in which case depending on what games you play more open gl or directx then you should go for whatever card runs them better. But otherwise with the exception of aa and af if you got a decent rig backing up this card you will run almost any resloution of up to about 1600x1200 with full details on most games and upcoming games for the next few months.

dubdvd

if i was going to go for one it would have to be the ati x800xt at the moment i have the ati x800pro with a zalman heatsink on it and without any real overclocking im getting im getting 11000 in 3dmark03 and in doom 3 it holds very well with very high detail and i can imagine what its big brother is capable of doing
but i was reading about the 6800 ultra and if you dont hold money as an option you can buy two and bridge them together and increase your proformance by upto 50 to 70% its called SLI or something like that ....the system takes 50% of what you see on the screen from one card and 50% from the other ...sounds good on paper ...but remember the price of a set up like this nearly a grand and 3 months later ...they bring out a new super card that leaves you hanging .......but hey thats what its all about
im going to hang on for the pci express ver of the ATI X800XT PE and most of the set up sourced already.....but i might be waiting a while for ati to get there pci x800xt out in the shops they do have a x300 and x600 pci-x....while nvidea already have there pci-x card out

Ciaran500

The reason the x800 does worse in d3 gets hit differently when rendering shadows, as the 6800 has that Shadow 2.0 tech thing (cant remember the exact name!) which was specifically for d3, which as u know is shadowtastic. I'm not so convinced that 3DC texture compression will make that much difference, as its x800's only, and uptill now all HL2 has been demo'd on 9800 XT's, which does not demonstrate this. I would also say, look at the pixel shading capabilites of the 6800, i.e. running 3d mark, farcry etc which as very shader orientated games/benchmarks, and you will see the 6800 perform pretty much equally, sometimes a few percentages less compared to the x800's.


EDIT: BTW PCI express is pretty pointless for graphics cards. There is a difference of a frame or two between AGP 4x and 8x. The graphics cards do not need the extra bandwith given by PCI Express.

And SLI won't be available for a while.

http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040310/index.html

BloodBath

I'm pretty close to going for a X800XT. I've been sitting on the fence waiting for a clear winner but it's proving a lot harder than I expected. You have the XT which performs better in direct 3d and seems to handle AA and AF a lot better than the 6800. It's older technology with great drivers and supposedly there is a vastly improved open gl driver optimisation on the way.

Then the 6800 comes along and owns in open gl titles. It has support for pixel shader 3. The first demonstration of this is in the new far cry patch and it does boost the performance of the 6800's but they still fall behind the XT in far cry. The card is new technology and the drivers are in their early stages so they have a lot to work on and performance should improve over the next few months as they optimise the drivers.

At the moment the X800XT seems to be the better card but this could change over the next few months.

They both overclock pretty well too. The XT's seem to go a bit further though. Me wants a HIS Artic XT.


BloodBath

Venom

I am going to go for the 6800 Ultra. Iv spent the last few days in work checking out reviews of the 6800 and x800 based cards and it seems the 6800 ultra's are just blowing the x800 pro and xts away. ATI can play down pixel shader 3.0 support all they want but more and more games are releasing patches with this and you can bet your last euro that the next ATI card will have it.Now what ever else you can say about ATI cards, there drivers suck bigtime and they just never have gotten this problem sorted out Nvidia really have gotten there act togeather with the 6800's and there drivers are ment to be really kick ass.


As for all the talk about HL2 being slightly faster on the x800 based cards, no one knows for sure and wont untill HL2 is released. Being neither a ATI or Nvidia fanboi I want the best card in my machine and at this point in time the 6800 ultra is the clear winner for me and I was planing on buying a x800 xt pe up utill this week. Im betting the Doom 3 engine is going to be apearing in alot more games than the HL2 one so thats the engine I want my next GFK card to handle the best.