ATI Radeon 9800 XT Review - PAGE 8

Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider has been the source of more contention than Lara Croft's b... uh brown hair. Angel of Darkness makes use of a lot of DX9 shaders and it gets very bogged down in several areas of our demo based on the prague3a level. All the cards slow down significantly in the water room and we can honestly say, the 9800 XT is the only card to pass through our labs so far that actually looks smooth in that particular room. Yes, there is a noticeable decrease in FPS but it was not molasses slow but looked very good. Very impressive. There is not much to say. The 9700/9800/9800XT all show pretty consistent performance; the slopes of the graphs are pretty much the same for all three cards. The 5950 is not as slick and must've fallen into one of those devious traps that Lara always finds herself in as it lags significantly behind.

X2 - The Threat Rolling Demo

Our final benchmark for the day. X2 is a slick looking space sim based from Egosoft. Very close performance between the 9800 Pro and XT. More of a dogfight between the 5950 and the 9700 Pro although the 5950 has the upperhand.