Doom 3 always favors NVIDIA cards which is exactly what we see, however, its worth nothing that the x850XT comes pretty close to an Ultra card in Doom 3 benchmarks

Far Cry: Without any AA or AF settings, the x850XT performs about the same as an Ultra card, however as we keep increasing the AA and AF, we see the x850XT taking over the 6800GT SLI setup and even the 6800 Ultra setup by a good 8%

Half Life 2: While Doom 3 favors NVIDIA, Half Life 2 likes ATI and that is clearly visible in Half Life 2 benchmarks where the x850XT comes above all NVIDIA cards in single or SLI mode

Riddick: Chronicles of Riddick is a new edition to our tests and its extremely resource hungry. The game likes NVIDIA cards more and the x850XT ends up in the last place across all tests.

Unreal Tournament 2004: The x850XT makes a comeback and once again scores above all NVIDIA cards in single or SLI mode. Keep in mind that UT2004 does not support SLI out of the box which is one reason why there isn?t much difference in single and SLI modes for NVIDIA cards.

Overclocking: The HIS x850 overclocked quite decently and the IceQ system certainly helped in taking this card above the stock x850XT PE speeds which gave about 10% better performance.

Price/Performance: Of the five games we tested, the HIS x850XT came out on top in three of them which is pretty darn good. In Riddick, it proved to be better than any 6800 SLI setup while in Doom 3 it proved to be better than an Ultra SLI setup.

Again, a pretty good card from HIS and while it offers great performance, we would recommend waiting a bit for prices to drop. Even though it performed well in the Price/Performance ratio, we think that spending over $600 on a single video card is a bit too much.