Doom3, Half-Life 2, Warhammer: Dawn of War, Chronicles of Riddick
Four games benchmarks round off our testing of the two new AGP R4-series ATI SKUs.Doom3
The X800 XL offers up fine performance, trailing the X850 XT Platinum Edition by expected amounts (mainly due to stencil buffer performance which is a product of core speed), apart from at 1600x1200, where the XL's performance was measured at nearly half that of the X850 XT PE. A slight blip in performance with our in-house Doom3 test.
Half-Life 2
When CPU limited, the X800 XL performs as the X850 XT PE does. That's the case until the top two resolutions, where the X850 XT PE can open up a gap. However, X800 XL's performance compared to the faster board makes it very compelling, for the price.
Warhammer: Dawn of War
Dawn of War, a game I've enjoyed recently, shows a similar performance trend. The X800 XL sits tight with the X850 XT Platinum Edition until resolution gets high and the increased memory bandwidth and core clocks of the board can influence performance.
Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher's Bay
Clocking the X850 XT Platinum Edition down to match the X800 XL shows that the way the GPU connects to the AGP bus doesn't affect performance. Riddick's OpenGL engine performs well on the R4-series ATI hardware.