Doom 3 is
the most advanced OpenGL game to date. It takes advantage of the latest
videocard technology and pushes the processing power of the CPU to its absolute
limits. At its highest setting, Ultra quality, texture sizes pass the 500MB mark
which means even tomorrow's videocards will have a hard time running everything.
The frame rates in the game itself are locked at 60 fps so anything above that point is
wasted. Each test is run three times and with the third run being
recorded.
Doom 3 shows how AA can affect performance, and it seems
like 6x AA is too much for the RX850XT-TD256E. Turning on 4xAA and 16x AF sure
does make the image much prettier though!
MSI's X850XT
L'il Speed Demon
If you've been craving a new
videocard that can run all with all the eye-candy cranked to the max , the MSI
RX850XT-TD256E is definitely one of the faster ones on the market. Based on the
Radeon X850 XT core and equipped with 256MB of smoking fast GDDR3 memory, the
RX850XT-TD256E has enough power to run any game on the market with plenty to
spare.
In typical MSI fashion, the RX850XT-TD256E comes
with a pretty decent software suite which includes three full version games,
XIII, URU and Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow. Sure the titles are not the
latest, but they have excellent entertainment value and will no doubt keep you
busy for a couple weeks. MSI also include all the necessary hardware to take
advantage of the TV Output capabilities of the videocard, something many
companies do not bother to do. On the downside, definitely the occupation of two
PCI slots by the large, and not so quiet stock ATI squirrel cage fan.
The benchmark
results speak for themselves and they're saying that this videocard is smoking
fast! From Doom 3 to Gun Metal, the RX850XT-TD256E had no problems running at
the highest resolutions. Even twin nVidia 6800 cards in SLI mode often could not
catch up.
Though, now in the face of the new Geforce 7800GTX
videocards, ATI has been sideswiped to some degree, and at a retail price of $620 CDN ($494 US) the MSI RX850XT-TD256E
is priced towards the upper end of the scale. Still, it's a good card for its
class, even if the X850XT GPU is no longer the absolute quickest chip on the
market anymore.
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