The VisionTek XTasy Titanium Series Line-up
Taking Graphics to the Next Level

By - Jeff Bouton
November 1, 2001 

Our Test System Pentium 4 Powerhouse

 
Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz. Processor

Abit TH7-RAID Pentium 4 Motherboard

256MB of Samsung PC800 RAMBUS DRDRAM

IBM DTLA307030 30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive

Windows 2000 Professional w/ SP2

Direct X 8.0a

nVidia Detonator 4 reference drivers version 21.85

ATi Performance Drivers Version 7.60-04

Intel chipset drivers version 3.20

Video Cards:

VisionTek Xtasy 6964 GeForce 3 Ti500

VisionTek Xtasy 6564 GeForce 3 Ti200

VisionTek Xtasy 5854 GeForce 2 Ti

ATi Radeon 8500

ATi Radeon 7500

As you'll see in the remaining pages, we've run the same benchmarks on all three cards and opted to include the same results for the new Radeon 7500 and 8500 video cards.  For more details on the new Radeon's design and performance, be sure to check Dave's excellent write up on the subject from a week ago.  For the utmost benchmark accuracy, all cards were tested on the same test system, the details of which can be found above.

On to the benching!
 

DirectX 8 with 3DMark 2001 and Max Payne A Little Pleasure, A Little Payne

The first up to bat is one of the more popular synthetic DirectX 8 benchmarks, 3DMark 2001.  Mad Onion's flagship benchmark utility does a fantastic job at stressing a video card's DirectX 8 capabilities.  So let's get to it and see how the Titanium's perform...

Right down the line, the Xtasy Series performed quite well at all resolutions.  The Ti500 was only slightly behind the performance of the Radeon 8500 at lower resolutions, but surpassed it at 1600x1200, which plays to the strength of the Titanium line.  When it comes to The GeForce 2 Ti though, the Radeon 7500 beat it hands down at every resolution.  Now we'll run Max Payne and see what we get.  Considering the two benchmarks use the same engine, we expect to see a fairly similar pattern...

Judging by the results, it is clear that Max Payne does an excellent job of stressing a video cards DirectX 8 gaming capability.  Unlike 3DMark, in this test the Ti200 and Ti500 easily beat out the Radeon at all resolutions, and the GeForce 2 Ti and Radeon were a dead heat throughout. 

Next we'll bring on a slew of OpenGL benchmarks to see how these cards can take the heat...
 

OpenGL with GLExcess XS Mark