Introduction

Today’s latest graphics cards sport anywhere from 12-16 pixel pipelines, quad 64-bit memory controllers for a grand total of 256-bit memory interface, and are built on cutting-edge manufacturing processes with transistor counts upwards of 150 million (RADEON X800 weighs in at 160 million transistors while GeForce 6800 contains 222 million) and ship with the fastest high-speed GDDR3 memory. These chips are the pixel pushing equivalent of Ferrari’s latest and greatest: the Enzo.

But just as Ferrari wouldn’t put 14” tires and wheels on an Enzo, you shouldn’t pair a GeForce 6800 Ultra or RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition with a component that would cripple its performance. Often times a gamer on a budget will spend all his money or the latest and greatest graphics card, and pair it with an anemic processor such as a Celeron or his three-year old Pentium 4 1.5GHz. This is simply a quick way to waste your money as the performance of the graphics card will be limited by the host CPU. This is where the term CPU-limited comes from and can be seen in our performance graphs when the frame rate stays the same regardless of screen resolution.

Scene from custom d1_canals_09 map

Getting shot at by helicopter

He is still shooting

Passing overhead, guess he is done

HL2 has beautiful water

Uh oh he is back and dropping mines

At the same time there are countless gamers with Athlon XP processors who would like to enjoy the best Half-Life 2 experience possible but don’t have the money to upgrade their CPU and graphics card simultaneously. The million dollar question for them is how much performance can I expect from a GeForce 6800 GT or RADEON X800 XT? Basically, which graphics card provides the most bang for my buck? This article is designed to deliver those answers.

We’ve combined four different Athlon XP processors based on two different cores, Barton and Thoroughbred. Athlon XP models included are the XP 2100+, 2500+, 2800+ (Barton), and 3200+. We also threw in a few overclocked Barton numbers at 2.4GHz.

Chase ensues

Rotor wash kicking up water

Sunset

Custom d1_canals01a map

I knock this guy out with headshot

Then man this gun turrent

Running alongside these Athlon XP processors are the latest graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA: GeForce 6800, 6800 GT, 6800 Ultra, and RADEON X800 PRO, X800 XT AGP, and X800 XT Platinum Edition. Our goal is to determine which graphics card delivers the most bang for your buck at a given clock speed. As you’ll see in the benchmarks, it’s not always about owning the most expensive graphics card, especially if you have a slower processor, but the card that delivers the best combination of price/performance, hopefully saving you some money as a result. For help in determining which CPU is right for you for CPU upgrading, check out Chris’ Half-Life 2 CPU shootout article from last week.

Scout approaches

Bye bye scout!

That is a big boom