Halo: Combat Evolved

This game was ported from Microsoft’s Xbox, so it can’t boast rich textures. The GPU has to execute numerous pixel shaders here, although of version 1.1, which create various visual effects. Because of using specific rendering methods, the game doesn’t support full-screen anti-aliasing.

It’s all right with the pixel shader performance of modern graphics cards, and there’s equality between the top-end solutions from ATI and NVIDIA. In the mainstream sector the GeForce 6600 GT takes its expected first place since it is the only AGP card of that class with a new architecture; its advantage over the RADEON 9800 XT is about 10fps, which is quite a lot considering that the absolute speeds are about 60fps.

A new leader filtered out of the PCI Express equipment, which is of course the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition from ATI. The SLI platform went through this test without problems, boasting an excellent speed. The pair of GeForces 6800 Ultra easily left behind the RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition, while the two GeForce 6600 GT were as fast as the single GeForce 6800 GT.