The Piranesi level is more spacious than Chateau and the GPU mostly has to manage textures here, since the geometry is simple and pixel shaders are practically absent. The RADEON X800 XT and the GeForce 6800 Ultra go neck and neck, while the RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition is beyond competition, although no more than 10 percent above the rest.

In the “eye candy?mode ATI’s cards again prove their ability to handle the FSAA+AF combination well. The GeForce 6600 GT AGP performs brilliantly in low resolutions, but in high ones gives way to its competitors with a wider 256-bit memory bus.

By the way, we met a strange problem after we had installed the latest game update. All PCI Express graphics cards from NVIDIA began to run this game very slow, and our reinstalling the driver didn’t help at all. Installing ForceWare 67.02 didn’t help, either. We tried to replace the hard drive with a backup one (with a copy of the OS and the games), but to no effect ?the PCI Express cards from NVIDIA still performed too slow.