Conclusions
The Radeon X800 series cards perform best in some of our most intensive benchmarks based on newer games or requiring lots of pixel shading power, including Far Cry, Painkiller, UT2004, and 3DMark03's Mother Nature scene—especially at high resolutions with edge and texture antialiasing enabled. The X800s also have superior edge antialiasing. Their 6X multisampling mode reduces edge jaggies better than NVIDIA's 8xS mode, and the presence of temporal antialiasing only underscores ATI's leadership here. With a single-slot cooler, one power connector, and fairly reasonable power requirements, the Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition offers all its capability with less inconvenience than NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 Ultra. What's more, ATI's X800 series will be in stores first, with a more mature driver than NVIDIA currently has for the GeForce 6800 line.

The folks at ATI have improved mightily on the R300 design with the R420, successfully delivering the massive performance leap necessary to keep pace with NVIDIA's new GPUs. The achievement of ATI's demo team with the Ruby demo is a heckuva reminder that ATI knows what it's doing with DirectX 9-class graphics, and a very strong argument that the X800's new, longer shader instruction limits don't preclude much higher quality graphics in real time than anything we've seen from game developers yet.

However, NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 cards are no pushovers this time around. The GeForce 6 cards are faster in OpenGL, in many older games, and in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. ShaderMark 2.0 is very close, too, proving that NVIDIA's new pixel shaders are very capable, even with a distinct clock speed deficit. The GeForce 6800 GPUs have some natural advantages, including support for Shader Model 3.0 with longer shader programs, dynamic flow control, and FP16 framebuffer blending and texture filtering. Down the road, these capabilities could prove useful for creating advanced visual effects with the highest possible fidelity.

Right now, though, NVIDIA needs to concentrate on getting some basics right. The NV40 is a novel chip architecture, and its drivers are very much in the beta stages. We'd like to see better results in newer titles like Far Cry, antialiasing blends that account for display gamma, and a consistent means of banishing "brilinear" filtering optimizations. Ideally, NVIDIA would make "brilinear" an option but not the default; the GeForce 6800 series is too good and too fast to need this crutch. It's possible NVIDIA will have worked out all of these problems by the time GeForce 6800 cards arrive in stores.

At present, ATI appears to be slightly ahead of NVIDIA, but its superiority isn't etched indelibly in silicon the way it was in the last generation of GPUs. The GeForce 6800 is an extremely capable graphics chip, and we don't know yet how good it may become. Whatever happens, you can see why I said this generation of GPUs presents us with a choice between better and best. These cards are all killer performers, and having seen Far Cry running on them fluidly, I can actually see the logic in parting with four or five hundred bucks in order to own one.