CPU Scaling ATI?s and NVIDIA?s Best

Published by

[H]ardOCP have thrown up a new article that looks at how well ATi and Nvidia latest video cards stack up on different platforms and at different CPU speeds! Here's a snip.

Want one of the new video cards but don't know whether or not you have enough CPU horsepower to back it up? This article is focused on showing you what level of gameplay a video card upgrade could net you today.

Recently NVIDIA and ATI both announced their next generation video card technology codenamed NV40 and R420 respectively. We have covered the technology behind NVIDIA?s and ATI?s new graphics cores already. If you haven?t heard about them, or need a refresher course, please first read the technology behind those graphics chips; NV40 Tech is here and R420 Tech is here. After reading about all of the technology behind each graphics chip you see that NVIDIA will have a whole series based on their technology, scaling from the value segment all the way up to the enthusiast segment. They have named this the GeForce 6 series. The first video card they have debuted to the public, which we initially reviewed here, is the GeForce 6800Ultra.

ATI?s new technology is currently only found in the enthusiast and performance segments, while their mainstream and value segments remain using the last generation's technology. The new name for the series using the new R420 technology is called the X800 series, with specific cards being the X800XT-Platinum Edition and the X800Pro. We have reviewed both of these.

In those reviews we concentrated on finding the best gaming experience that each card provides on one test platform. We used an ABIT IC7-G with a Pentium 4 3.4GHz ?C? processor. One thing we have been asked about a lot recently is how these video cards perform across different platforms and levels of CPU speeds.

This article will address CPU scaling on the GeForce 6800Ultra, Radeon X800XT-PE, and Radeon X800Pro. We are going to use three games, FarCry, Battlefield Vietnam, and Flight Simulator 2004 with two sections, Highest Playable and Apples-to-Apples.

CPU Scaling ATI?s and NVIDIA?s Best