Power consumption
With each of the graphics cards installed and running, I used a watt meter to measure power draw on our test system, as shown in our Testing Methods section, to see how many watts it pulled. The monitor was plugged into a separate power source. I took readings with the system idling at the Windows desktop and with it running a real-time HDR lighting demo at 1024x768 full-screen.

The Radeon X800 Pro actually pulls less juice than the Radeon 9800 XT, believe it or not, and the Radeon X800 XT PE only requires a little more power than the 9800 XT. At idle, the new ATI GPUs consume much less power than the 9800 XT, as well.

The GeForce 6800 GT looks reasonably good on the power consumption front, as well, but the GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme is another story. This card runs hot and loud, its cooler blowing a notch faster than the other cards when it's just sitting idle.

High dynamic range rendering
Finally, I've got to include just one shot from the "dribble" demo, just so you can see what the frame rate counter's showing on the Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition. You can see compare frame rate counters from other cards here.


Radeon X800 XT

ATI has really raised the performance bar dramatically with this chip. Getting three times the performance of a Radeon 9800 XT in this shader-intensive demo is no small thing.