LOSTCIRCUITS

Tech and Price Specs at One Glance

What we are going to do today is a bit of comparing apples and oranges. We have three different graphics cards with very different performance characteristics and price points and really the only thing they have in common is the fact that they are all using a PCIe interface. On the low side we have the RADEON X300 with its 64 MB of standard DDR and the rather pedestrian X300 core, on the high end, we have the Sapphire X800XT and somewhere in between is the nVidia GeForce 6800GT. This kind of ranking holds for performance as well as for the price point, the X300 in the form tested runs approximately US $50.- whereas the Sapphire X800XT will be difficult to find below US $500.- The GeForce 6800GT starts at about US$ 400.-

The main reason to include the X300 in this roundup was that despite what by today’s standards looks like anemic features and performance it is not that far that we have to reach into the past to find graphics cards with very similar performance that were running at a much higher price point and some of these cards are still around, one example would be the numerous RADEON 8500’s that are still on active duty. The performance of the X300 and the technical specs are, in fact rather similar to that of the obsolete RADEON 8500 with the exception of a native PCIe interface (the increased overclockability of which hardly matters in this case) and the support for DX9 which, as we will see in a bit does not really matter either.

Some technical specs in comparison with other RADEONs and GeForce FX

In absence of hard specs on the up and coming nVidia GeForce 6200, we left that particular "consumer budget" model out even though it would have been very interesting to include it in this roundup. Keep in mind that the worls of graphics adapaters revolves at an extremely rapid pace and that new iterations, especially in the mid range, pop up like mushrooms on almost a weekly basis. In view of this, the above chart is meant mainly to provide some sort of reference for owners of the respective models to get an idea where to place the candidates of today's roundup compared to their own graphics card.

The fact that the rest of the system configuration will play an important role in the overall performance is another story altogether. There is some truth to the rumor that the P4's gaming performance does not live up to any of the high end Athlon64 systems, to ameliorate this, er, handicap, we are using the Extreme Edition of the P4 since PCI Express support on Athlon 64 boards is not readily available yet.

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