Fall 2003 Video Card Roundup Part I - ATI's Radeon 9800 XT

X2

X2 is a game that is due out in November, but for now, they have a really extensive benchmark/demo out that pushes a lot of different aspects of the graphics engine. This benchmark is a simple download and run. We used the benchmark with everything but antialiasing enabled.

From these two graphs, it seems like NVIDIA is the clear winner, but in watching this demo run so many times, we noticed that the NVIDIA cards were running choppier than the ATI cards, and we again had some image quality questions we need to answer. We will also have to take a look at the variation between setting AA in the driver and in the application, if, indeed, there are any differences. This benchmark does say that NVIDIA would be the top choice for funning X2 right now, but it would be best to hold off on making that call until we can explore these results a little better.