ASUS V9999 Ultra Deluxe - GeForce 6800 Ultra

HOW WE CONFIGURED THE TEST SYSTEM: We tested the ASUS V9999 Ultra Deluxe on an i875P-based DFI LANPARTY Pro875B motherboard, powered by an Intel Pentium 4 3.2CGHz CPU. The first thing we did when configuring this test system was enter the BIOS and load the "High Performance Defaults." Then we set the memory to operate at 200MHz in dual-channel mode, with the CAS Latency and other memory timings set by the SPD. Next we set the AGP aperture size to 256MB, formatted the hard drive, and installed Windows XP Professional with SP1. When the installation was complete, we installed the Intel chipset drivers and hit the Windows Update site to download and install all of the available updates. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers for the rest of our components and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating, System Restore, and Drive Indexing were then disabled; the hard drive was defragmented; and a 768MB permanent page file was created on the same partition as the Windows installation. Finally, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed the benchmarking software, and ran all of the tests.

The HotHardware Test System Pentium 4 Northwood 3.2GHz Performance

Head-to-Head Performance With Tomb Raider: AOD The Anti-Greatest!

Tomb Raider: AOD

Although Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness won't be winning any "Game of the Year" awards, it does employ several DX9 shader effects in its game engine. We've recorded a custom demo of Lara jogging through an indoor garden area in the "Prague3" map. When using the Pixel Shader 2.0 code path, this area of the game utilizes a DOF (depth of field) blurring effect to enhance the sense of depth and vastness in the area.  We ran our custom demo at a resolution of 1,024 x 768 and then again at 1,600 x 1,200, using both the Pixel Shader 1.4 and 2.0 code paths (with and without 4x antialiasing enabled in the PS 2.0 tests).

Our Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness testing favored the reference ASUS Radeon X800 XT card in general, especially with the PS 2.0 code path enabled without AA.  However, enable additional pixel processing with AA, and the gap closes back toward the GeForce 6800 Ultra-driven ASUS V9999 Ultra Deluxe.  Also note that the V9999 Ultra Deluxe is within striking distance of GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition performance in this test and logically, slightly ahead of standard GeForce 6800 Ultra performance, with its moderately goosed-up 425MHz core clock speed.