ATI's Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition

Compared to the X800 XT:

Compared to ATI's previous flagship, the X850 XT PE offers a 0 - 10% increase in performance, with the biggest gains coming in Battlefield and Doom 3. The performance improvements aren't negligible, but definitely no reason to upgrade from a X800 XT. If you're stuck choosing between the two, what's another $50 when you're already spending $500 on a video card?

Compared to NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Ultra:

Next up we have the X850 XT PE compared to NVIDIA's flagship, the GeForce 6800 Ultra, which is currently only available through OEMs in a PCI Express version.

ATI has always done better in Battlefield than NVIDIA has, so it's no surprise to see the X850 XT PE with a huge advantage there. The rest of the games are basically a wash with the exception of Doom 3 and Half Life 2. Under Doom 3, the X850 XT PE is about 15% slower than the GeForce 6800 Ultra, but the tables are turned as soon as you look at Half Life 2, where the X850 XT PE is almost 17% faster than the GeForce 6800 Ultra. So which card do you pick? Well, both happen to run every single game out on the market just fine at the highest resolutions/detail settings so you can't really go wrong either way. The issue here is predicting whether more developers will use Valve's Source engine or id's Doom 3 engine for future games, and at this point that's a tough prediction to make.

The Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition basically offers smoother playability at 1600 x 1200 in all of today's games (including Half Life 2 and Doom 3) than either of the previous reigning champions, the X800 XT and the GeForce 6800 Ultra. Now let's have a look at the rest of the X850 line...

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