Jedi Knight 2 makes use of a largely tweaked and enhanced Quake 3 engine. It is a decent modern-day OpenGL benchmark, as it manages to tax video cards a fair bit without being bottlenecked by the processor. All graphics settings were set to their maximum (including trilinear texture filtering). We used the NVIDIA control panel in order to enable AA/AF.




The 6800 GT SLI pair lead the pack here, with the 7800 GTX following closely behind. The X850 XT PE flirts around with the two, but ultimately ends up a distant last, joining the slow-poke 6800 Ultra at 1600x1200 4x AA/8x AF.

Halo

Halo does a good job of measuring the performance of vertex and pixel shaders. Testing was done with a batch file, with no sound enabled. The NVIDIA control panel was used to enable AF.




The 7800 GTX's re-worked pixel shaders and 24 pipelines give it a definitive lead in Halo. Not even the 6800 GT SLI pair can come close to challenging it. The X850 flirts with the 6800 GTs for a bit, but ends up placing an overall third. The 6800 Ultra is last (no surprise there).

UT2k4

Unreal Tournament isn't that great a benchmark, as it is wildly bottlenecked by the processor -- but it serves one good purpose: illustrating the efficiency of different driver implementations. We use a batch file to run a timedemo on dm-metallurgy. Sound is disabled, and AA/AF options are enabled through the corresponding graphics control panel.

The 7800 GTX takes the lead here, with the 6800 Ultra following behind. The 6800 GT SLI pair, with its slight CPU management overhead, places third. The X850 XT PE places last, except in the case of 1600x1200 4x AA/8x AF, where it manages to pull ahead of the 6800 Ultra.