Sapphire Radeon X850 Pro 256MB PCI Express


HH Test Platform, Benchmarking with FFXI and 3DMark05

HotHardware's Test System
Not all are created equal...

Pentium D 820 at 2.8GHz
Intel D945GTPLR system board
(Intel 945G Chipset)
2x512MB PQI24200 Turbo Memory DDR2-533
CL 3-3-3-8
Sapphire Radeon X850 Pro 256MB (506/1040)
Gigabyte X800 Turbo 256MB (400/988)
HIS X700 Pro 256MB (460/960)

On-board Ethernet
On-board Audio
WD 80GB HD
7200 RPM IDE
Windows XP Pro SP-2

DirectX 9.0c
ATI Catalyst 5.5


Performances Comparisons With Final Fantasy XI Benchmark 3
A Classic Console Franchise On The PC

Final Fantasy XI
The Final Fantasy franchise is well known to console gamers, but Squaresoft has since made the jump to the PC with a MMORPG version of this classic. The Final Fantasy XI benchmark 3 runs through multiple scenes from the game and displays a final score every time a full cycle of the demo is completed. Although the demo is meant the check an entire system's readiness to play the game, the number of frames rendered scales when different video cards are used. Lower scores indicate some frames were dropped to complete the demo in the allotted time. The scores below were taken with the demo set to its "High Resolution" option (1024x768), with anti-aliasing disabled.

With Final Fantasy XI's Benchmark 3, there was little differentiation between the three cards tested.  The Sapphire X850 Pro and Gigabyte X800 Turbo were neck-in-neck while the HIS X700 Pro trailed by 250 points.

Performance Comparisons With 3DMark05
Futuremark's Latest - The Jury is Still Out...


3DMark05
3DMark05 is the latest installment in a long line of synthetic 3D graphics benchmarks, dating back to late 1998.  3DMark99 came out in October of 1998 and was followed by the very popular DirectX 7 benchmark, 3DMark2000, roughly two years later.  The DirectX 8.1-compliant 3DMark2001 was released shortly thereafter, and it too was a very popular tool used by many hardcore gamers.  3DMark03, however, wasn't quite as well received thanks in no small part to the disapproval of graphics giant NVIDIA.  With 3DMark05, though, Futuremark hopes to win back some of its audience with a very advanced DirectX 9 benchmarking tool.  We ran 3DMark05's default test (1,024 x 768) on all of the cards we tested and have the overall results for you posted below...

3DMark05 showed a much broader variation in scores than we saw with Final Fantasy.  With the X850 and X800 cards, it was all about the clockspeed, with the X850 Pro benefiting from a 106MHz core advantage over the X800.  The 8-Pixel Pipe X700 Pro trailed the X850 Pro byclose to 1750 3DMarks.


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