Benchmark results
In order to see how the K8T890 performs, we've tested with three of the most graphics-intensive games around. First up is DOOM 3. We tried a couple of different quality modes for this game, to see what would happen. The medium quality mode uses smaller textures and is recommended by id Software for cards with 128MB of memory. The high quality mode is recommended for cards with 256MB, so there should be more texture data flying about in that mode.

In either mode, the K8T890 performs about on par with the K8T800 Pro. It's a little slower in both cases, but the margin of difference is slim.

Next up is the video stress test of the Source engine that will power Half-Life 2.

The K8T890 Pro actually looks a little faster here, but not by enough to count for much.

Next, we have three different Far Cry demos.

Again, it's very close, but the K8T890 holds its own. Overall, its gaming performance isn't bad, but we'd hope production boards will match the AGP-based K8T800 Pro stride for stride.

Finally, we'll look at a synthetic test that copies an image from the video card's frame buffer back into main memory. Unlike the gaming benchmarks, we'd expect this one to show us some real differences between AGP and PCI-E.

Not bad. We saw about 369MB/s transfer rates with the Intel 925X chipset, but that was with WinXP Service Pack 1 and a different version of ATI's drivers, so I hesitate to make to direct a comparison. Obviously, the K8T890 Pro's PCI-E X16 slot offers quite a bit more bandwidth than an AGP slot.