Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness
Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness gets its own special little intro here because its publisher, EIDOS Interactive, has released a statement claiming that the V49 patch, which includes a performance benchmark, was never intended for public release. Too late, the patch is already public. We've used these extreme quality settings from Beyond3D to give the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra a thorough workout in this DirectX 9 game, and the results speak for themselves.

The Radeons wipe the floor with the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra. To be fair, NVIDIA claims that the Tomb Raider benchmark incorrectly uses a generic DirectX 9 code path rather than NVIDIA's GeForce FX-optimized code path for the game. If that is indeed the case, our results highlight just how much the GeForce FX line needs optimized code paths in order to be competitive.

AquaMark3

The Radeon 9600 XT is out ahead in AquaMark3, which makes extensive use of DirectX 9 shaders.

Halo
I used the "-use20" switch with the Halo benchmark to force the game to use version 2.0 pixel shaders.

The Halo benchmark also shows the Radeons way out ahead, with the 9600 XT leading the way. Halo's benchmark timedemo renders cut-scene footage, which is important to note since the benchmark results don't necessarily reflect real-world gameplay performance. However, the timedemo still uses Halo's graphics engine, so it's fair game for comparing the relative performance of different graphics cards.

Halo also isn't compatible with the GeForce FX's antialiasing, but ATI's Smoothvision antialiasing seems to work just fine.

Real-Time High-Dynamic Range Image-Based Lighting
To test the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra's performance with high-dynamic-range lighting, we logged frame rates via FRAPS in this technology demo at its default settings. The demo uses high-precision texture formats and version 2.0 pixel shaders to produce high-dynamic-range lighting, depth of field, motion blur, and glare, among other effects.

The Radeons XT looks great running this demo, and performance isn't too shabby, either. The XT isn't leaps and bounds ahead of the Radeon 9600 Pro, but there's still a noticeable performance gap between the two cards.