GeForce 6800 Ultra vs Radeon X800XT Platinum Edition | Card Battles

[@PixelPipes]

When I was gaming on the PC in 2004, I just had a GeForce 6800 (no suffix). What card did you have that year, and how well did it run the games you were playing?

[@vshade]

Radeon 9600se, was playing Half Life 2, max payne 2, need for speed underground

[@FusionC6]

9800 Pro 128MB AGP, overclocked pretty high. Not long after I would buy a X850 Pro 256MB AGP, which I could flash the bios and unlock into a X850XT PE. That made me happy! ;)

[@retropcscotland4645]

I had the Geforce 6600 256mb agp edition. Still own it made by gigabyte. Best damn card of the era for me and still works to this day.

[@miloljubparezanovic7970]

HIS Radeon 9600 XT but 128mb not 256mb....with blue led fan...:)

[@kylejohnson7156]

I had an Nvidia 6200 but the early one where I could unlock the other 4 pipelines to make it a poor mans 6600. I was playing mostly console games but played CS and CS:S along with their base games of HL and HL2 on PC. I also had a sempron with the L2 cache unlocked to make it into an athlon

[@wakesake]

The days when ATi was king I miss those days when games were epic and tech was evolving crazy fast , the last 5/6 years have been shit

[@soylentgreenb]

I couldn't possibly disagree more strongly. The 80's and the 90's were fantastic, with new genres popping up all the time and technology improving massively. Nothing was set in stone. Early 00's most games started to become really expensive to make; they had larger team sizes and the wackiness and genius of individuals was averaged out by a great mass of mediocre team members to make somewhat well polished but very mediocre games. Most developers started targetting people who had never played games; people who wanted an interactive movie, no challenge, no consequences for failure, no though consequences for your actions or choices, nowhere you can get stuck, nowhere you can get lost, no weird difficulty spikes. You consumed the game like you'd drink a soda can and discard the container. The people holding the purse strings stood watch to make sure the team simply cranked out mediocre copy-cat games. The only thing that saved the first half of the 00's was modders. Modders kept the spirit of 90's era gaming alive. I must have spent 2000 hours playing Natural Selection, Team fortress, Day of Defeat and Science and industry. Since the mid 00's or so total conversion mods were just too big to make. Sequel after sequel to some great PC games turned out to be somewhere between mediocre and outright bad. Doom 3; Half-life 2; Oblivion; Gothic 3; Bioshock; Deus Ex invisible war; Thief Deadly shadows; Serious sam 2. The future of gaming looked just pitch black. In the last 5 years or so nearly every AAA game has been like replaying the same action-adventure-RPG-third person shooter hybrid in myriad minor variations. I don't care about any of the characters; the gameplay sucks; the story is forgettable and the cut scenes just have me mashing to skip. It's like the movie Ground hog day on repeat. At the same time there has been a massive explosion of indie games, bringing back the 90's spirit. Games again dare confront you with difficult choices, lasting consequences and challenging gameplay. Divinity original sin; Kerbal Space programme; Braid; Rock of ages; Portal (Valve has always been great at bringing in indie developers and modders and helping them realize their visions); Super meat boy; Natural selection 2; Depth; Drunken Robot robot pornography; Race the sun; Legend of Grimrock; Brütal legend; Devil daggers; Orcs must die; Defense grid; Elite dangerous. There are more great games than there is time to play them. Most of them appeal to fairly niché audience, but they do so better than any of the polished turd AAA games can ever do. Even non-indie, non-AAA, developers seem to have realized that people are getting better at playing games and some actually want a challenge. With games such as the Dark souls series. Smaller teams at established developers are now kicking out some great geames. Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons; Grow home; Doom 2016; Serious sam 3. VR, which I have wanted since the early 90's is a thing and as good as I expected it could be one day. It will take over the world; not yet; but give it a decade. It's here to stay, not just another false start.

[@cyphaborg6598]

@@soylentgreenb yeah and now you have a Dark Souls formula seeping into other IP's,don't get me wrong it might turn out well like: God of War and Sekiro but even that is getting old.

[@TheRandomshite123]

Problem with evolving fast is hardware became outdated and too slow, too quickly

[@deafyboy86]

Problem is there's no real competition from AMD at the moment. So we're not seeing peak graphics development, nVidia simply has no reason to release the fastest, most screaming card going at the moment. Much like the stagnant CPU market till Ryzen came along.

[@TheVanillatech]

ATI have always been king for me. Loved their cards since the Rage 128 Ultra.

[@MaTtRoSiTy]

2004 was a great year for gaming for me. However the 6800 Ultra was only a dream and I had to settle for upgrading my FX5600 XT to a 6600GT, which was an awesome upgrade at the time...

[@PixelPipes]

I have a lot to say about the 6600GT.

[@MaTtRoSiTy]

PixelPipes cool!

[@milendimitrov430]

I had ASUS 6600GT - what a beautiful card! The pencil volt mods were crazy. Then I got the one that always came in to my dreams the mermaid from the video above - 6800 Ultra. After that I went for 7600GT, again a great card. Then 8800GT. What a great time to be a gamer indeed! Until Radeon 290X and now GTX1070 ... looking at the new cards from both companies for upgrade. :) I got to say, still not a bad time to be a gamer, I bet we will remember with nostalgia the same in 15 years.

[@RetroAmateur1989]

@@milendimitrov430 I wish I had the luxury of upgrading that frequently. I got a new PC in 2004 with an athlon 64 3400+ and a 6800GT. I then got the 3850 AGP for the same PC. It wasn't until mid 2008 that I got a new computer with an E8500 and a 9800GTX+.

[@govnonatarelke10007]

6600 GT outperforms the 5950 ultra by 25%, so i guess it's worth your choice. But still, even the Radeon 9800 Pro, the slower card, still outperformed the 5950.

[@sgtjarhead99]

I was one of the first to get my hands on a X800XT PE. Was the envy of the all the HW forums at the time. Still one of my favorite cards of all time. Came boxed with an ATI Ruby demo CD and an awesome X800XT PE t-shirt that featured the minotaur that was used on the retail box. Wore that t-shirt until it came apart over the years. I think I still have that card laying around in a box somewhere. Great memories.

[@03chrisv]

I remember getting a GeForce 6800 to replace my GeForce FX 5700 Ultra, it was a big upgrade. I was finally able to run HL2 in DX9 mode at high settings and it looked next-gen at the time. Doom 3 and Far Cry were also beautiful and blew me away. Now all these years later I'm rocking a RTX 4070 and I'm very impressed by its performance. I read that the 6800 Ultra has raw compute performance of 53 gigaflops whereas the 4070 has 29 teraflops. If we do the math that means the 4070 has 547 times more raw compute performance than the 6800 Ultra. Now add in DLSS upscailing and frame generation and the performance of the 4070 just gets ludicrous. GPU tech has come a long way in 19 years.

[@BurkeSchneider]

Awesome video, I really enjoyed this one. I was an avid 9th Grade gamer in 2004. I cant help but agree and also relate closely to your closing thoughts. It was a great time to experience. We had Doom 3 and Half Life 2 and Far Cry. I was lucky enough to be using an ATI 9700 Pro in early 2003. One of my close friends later purchased a 6800 GT and we were just blown away at the performance.

[@gregoryberrycone]

the ultimate era for pc graphics tech. half life 2 looked incredibly real to me at the time, and just a year later we had F.E.A.R which introduced some really impressive effects that pushed my x800 to the limit.

[@c-dub8639]

EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOUR VIDEOS ARE SO WELL DONE!!! I was born in 1990 and remember being 14 and 15, my brother having an Asus EN6800GT PCIE (i still have that card) and an athlon64 3500+ all driving a 1600x1200 monitor at his house. My father's computer had a athlonXP 2400+ and and geforce2 mx400 driving 1280x1024 res (later i bought a geforce 6200 for HL2, from money earned by washing my dads car every week for two months). HALF-LIFE 2 came out and i eagerly looked forward going to his house for SUBSTANTIALLY better framerates. I've since acquired all his exact hardware, and playing through HL2 again, it couldn't consistantly hold 60FPS at max 1080P, and infact was quite rough at times. HL2 really wants a duel core and a 7900GTX or even a 8800GTX if you want hold 60FPS solid! I love having a small collection of cards and CPUs to relive my teenage years, and having to constantly battle between smooth franmerates and image quality, all while saving up, allowance after allowance, for my next GPU upgrade!

[@soylentgreenb]

for that kind of machine you don't want to use the most modern version of Half-life 2 running in modern steam. You'd want to use an old version before they added better shadows etc.

[@PinkFloydFreak55]

I know this is an old vid, but thanks for the nostalgia- around 2004/5 I didnt have a PCIE system but my old Sempron based system DID have AGP8X and the 6800XL from XFX came in that interface - my god the performance boost that little 15 year old me got after working all summer for that card and a PSU to push it. Been gaming on PC predominantly since.

[@3dfxvoodoo]

Best Retro - Vintage Channel in youtube!

[@sly_botts1189]

2022: "15 usd for an x800? Ha ha ha ha ha... Sniff sniffle.. waahhh wahhh oh the humanity! Why?" Lol

[@francise.eichleriii4325]

Before I got a 6800 ultra, I had a radeon x800 gto with the disabled pixel pipes unlocked. Love both cards.

[@Obie327]

I also remember the time fondly when I purchased my 6800 GT. I was rocking then an ATI 9600XT on an Intel P4 3.0 ghz Northwood. (875 chipset) Steam came shortly after with Half life 2/Orange box. Great times ahead in gaming. Thanks for the video PixelPipes!

[@8KilgoreTrout4]

Absolute gem of a channel. I could listen to these types of facts all freaking day and never get bored.. I talk to my computer screen all the time while listening and watching these!

[@totalrandomtechnolog]

Indeed 2004 was an amazing year! Yet i remember still struggling along with my aging Geforce 3Ti 200 that could run UT2k4 more or less ok... As for Doom3, well it was destroyed by it :)

[@soylentgreenb]

You didn't miss anything by not playing Doom 3 on good hardware. It had harsh, super unrealistic stencil shadows that looked worse than the smooth and realistic, but painfully low res lighting of the aging Half-life engine; at times approaching the sector lighting from the original Doom. If you disable the shadows, it not only runs much faster, it looks much better. Gameplay wise, it betrayed everything Doom stood for and the gunplay didn't feel very good.

[@GraveUypo]

disabling the shadows affected gameplay. there are multiple occasions where doom3 used shadows as part of the narrative. still, "meh" game and really the best version is the xbox (og) version, because it cuts a lot of the crap padding.

[@soylentgreenb]

Narrative is not something I'm looking for in a Doom game (I still have no idea what the 320x200 wall-of-text "story" screens said in Doom 2 between episodes because I just skipped them) and poorly made jump scares is not something I'm looking for in a horror game.

[@GraveUypo]

i mean, they were used to set up the atmosphere of some places. as well as that.

[@TimTaylor99]

Which I found ironic back then 'cause early presentations run on something like the Gf3 😅 Okay, development took a few years longer than expected and they integrated newest shaders but still ironic it was struggling that hard 😑 I had a Gf 4 4400 and later the FX 5900XT 🙏

[@ZeroHourProductions407]

So, my x850 is properly dead, but now I somehow ended up with an x800 xt pe; mostly because as good as the 6800gt was, its cooler and that for the cpu were practically colliding unless I yanked the fan(s), and that just wouldn't do for long term use. That said, for running Windows 98se, final driver to final driver, I found the reverse to be true. Especially on OpenGL games and benchmarks, a 6600gt was scoring better than my x850 platinum while it was still running. System in question had: Athlon64 3700+ MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum motherboard 512MB RAM (to avoid 98se being fussy) Soundblaster Audigy2 in 3DMark01se, the Radeon wasn't that far behind against the 6800GT; typically around 1000 points in the total benchmark score. In Aquamark 3, however, it was... drastic. The Radeons, and even the x850xt pe, were simply not as strong as the geforce 6800 series samples I have on hand (6600GT and 6800GT). It's also noticeable in Quake 3 Arena where the frame variance is much more pronounced on the Radeon, leading to stutters. With the 6800gt especially, even uncapped on Q3A, it's reaching around 500fps at 1280x1024. The screen tearing is so pronounced at such a framerate I had to reapply the framerate cap because it was so distracting, LOL.

[@emanemanresuresu]

Dude, i had a x800 pro or something and flashed it to XTPE. Great times!

[@giliansteen9233]

emanemanresuresu same here unlocking piplines :-)

[@ThePsycotrip]

it was a great card until i tried to run rainbow six Vegas that needed shader model 3

[@FusionC6]

I just bought a X800XT 256MB PCI-E card a few weeks ago, I paid 10 dollars. Glad to see it kick ass.

[@jeremyjohnson8844]

FusionC6 It hasn't kicked ass in over a decade.

[@K3NnY_G]

Awww man, I remember my X800, pencil modding it, loading the XT BIOS up. Those, man were those the days.

[@MrVitalic85]

K3NnY_G Remember the pencil trick to unlock the fsb on amd cpu ?

[@raphaelrodriguez1856]

Great video. Reminds me of being a kid again building my first pc! Can’t wait to see more

[@foch3]

This was an awesome generation and you did a great job with this.

[@NightSprinter]

Amazingly, my 2004 retro build was a Shuttle XPC I founf at a thrift store in Orlando. Had a 3.2GHz P4, 2GB DDR-400, and a 6800GT. Was surprised to pay $40 after tax for it all. Runs the games I want for that era rather nicely.

[@chrisducati26]

What a great year 2004 was! I had an athlon 64 3500+ with ati radeon 9800 pro playing HL 2 was battery smooth what a Nostalgia!

[@Wahinies]

Almost shed a tear at 12m yes I am fortunate to have been an enthusiast at the time and since my experience goes back to dial up days, I feel fortunate that broadband is pretty much ubiquitous (and about to be more so thanks to Starlink). Thank you for the trip down memory lane!

[@amdintelxsniperx]

i have a 6800 ultra at 430 mhz 1140 in my power mac g5 agp and its nice ill be snagging an x800 or x850 soon

[@batofgotham4383]

I bought a brand new Aopen 6800 Ultra and an AC NV Silencer 5 Rev 2 vga cooler for a lot of money just shortly after release . I tried immediately Far Cry in 1280x1024 at home and the picture quality was staggering on my 21" Sony FD trinitron crt. That softness and beautifully shaded images with high end colours and SM 3.0 was the best I ever saw. After that I bricked the card on the firts attempt of mouting the nv silencer onto it. After installation the 6800 Ultra did not start anymore. Just the one long and three short beeps of death vga. I tried everything reassembled the reference cooler but nothing helped. The beautiful and expensive 6800 Ultra was dead. I was able to rma it in the shop but the 6800 ultra was after that extremly out of stock for a longer period of time so I waited. After a month or so they offered me a Leadtek 6600 GT SLI Pack for the same price which I accepted. But neither the performance nor the image quality of this sli duo approached the 6800 ultra. It was the saddest experience of my entire computer life so far. The 6800 Ultra is a legend for me.

[@PixelPipes]

Oh RIP! Yeah the 6600GTs could be faster SOMETIMES if the drivers were properly optimized, but SLI and dual card setups in general were always inconsistent.

[@batofgotham4383]

@@PixelPipes Update. I finally managed after 19 years to get a flawless functioning BFG 6800 Ultra OC AGP in great condition. Im very happy with it. Keep up the good work with your videos!

[@tHeWasTeDYouTh]

Does anyone remember what the prices was for these cards when they came out in 2004???

[@KabelkowyJoe]

400-550$ it was expensive fr what i remember,, x600,x700 cheeper wasnt as good as 6600GT having same features and performance as old Radeon 9800 radeon cards, x series ATI was not wort puchsasing. From what i remember late 2005 Radeon 9600 was still 100$ , 9550 50$ oossible to overclock up to 400MHz meaning 9800,x600 probably cost 200$ for such reason ATI released 1600,1650 it was good for short time, cause 7000 was around corner. 6600,6800 one of best investments that time - cause of Shader Model 3.0

[@tHeWasTeDYouTh]

@@KabelkowyJoe thanks

[@cyphaborg6598]

I just saw a EVGA Geforce 6800 Ultra on ebay for $499,that's crazy... I understand nostalgia but that will buy you a very decent modern GPU.

[@retrogeek4372]

Yeah, that specific card is overpriced even if it's a brand new unopened old-stock. BUT don't forget that it's a collector's item that isn't manufactured for over 15 years now. There will only be fewer and fewer of those cards as slowly all of them die or gets thrown into trash by people who see no value in vintage computing. Modern GPUs are manufactured on demand. If the market needs more there will be more.

[@classicallpvault]

I understand nostalgia to the games, not the hardware. What's the most powerful GPU to support Windows XP fully (e.g. no technical issues like with NVIDIA's 700 series which are limited to full HD resolution)? The Radeon HD 7970/280X. Why on Earth would someone who wants an XP retro gaming rig not go for the most powerful XP-supported hardware? Especially because these cards are relatively plentiful and can be picked up for a few tenners. Also, they look better than that green or red PCB and translucent vacuum cleaner look on old GPUs. Some of them even come with a backplate.

[@retro4fun358]

Hello Pixel Pipes can you say why GTA San ANdreas is even lagging on a Geforce 8600GT in some ares the fps drops to 26-29 fps... even with this card but in some areso i get 60-90 fps.Its very strange... System is intel Q8300 and 4GB DDR2 Ram

[@LegacyIvyTerascale]

0:00 NFS Underground 2 ............................................. one of my personal favorites GTA San Andreas ............................................................ best video game ever FIFA 2005 Halo 2 Gran Turismo 4 ..................................................................................... in Japan Spider Man 2 Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater Metal Gear Solid The Twin Snakes Burnout 3 Takedown Counter-Strike Condition Zero Final Fantasy XI Unreal Tournament 2004 World of Warcraft Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow The Legend of Zelda The Minish Cap Counter Strike Source Far Cry RalliSport Challenge 2 ............................................................... not for PC 😥 The Sims 2

[@RedLine_Renesis]

You touch very interesting retro topics. I also agree on the fact that 2004 was a great gaming year. I remember coming from middle school and just running home to play Farcry, Painkiller, Unreal Tournament 2004, and so on. I wonder if you'd be willing to go back a few more years. Back to 486 I guess. I hope you get more subs. Cheers!

[@Romess1]

My first big graphics card was the X1900XTX, but I was inspired to hardware due to this series of hardware, always gawking at X800/6800 benchmarks. Very fun to watch :)

[@hivaidz3250]

DDR3 really did change the game and the year was awesome. I got a 6600GT to replace my disappointing FX5700. The 66 had half the memory but ran circles over the FX to over 3x the scale of performance. Changed everything for cards after that until the 8800 came around and permanently altered what we know to be the graphics engine

[@adriankoneszko9176]

I have a problem with Geforce 6800 GT PCIE and Geforce 7950 GT PCIE performance in Farcry, it is worse than with Radeon 9800 XT. In 3D Mark 2003 is OK. I have tried many Forceware versions: 61.11, 91.36, 93.71, 163.71, 71.89, 78.03. My platform is: AMD Phenom II X4 3 GHz, GA-MA78G-DS3H, 4 GB DDR2 and Win XP. Farcry version is 1.5. What can I do to fix this ?

[@adriankoneszko9176]

I have fix this disabling HDR.

[@DJpiya1]

At that time X800XT was kind f a dream come true GPU, it ran out of stock v soon, went through many troubles to find one, golden time with Underground 2 😍😍❤

[@kztech1319]

I'm watching this video to have an idea whats good performance back then in benchmark numbers. And yeah you are right about year over year gap being so big. I'm testing a Precision M90 with Quadro FX 3500M thats essentially a 7950 Go and even that mobile chip with Quadro drivers crushes the 6800 Ultra in scores!

[@binaryzero6804]

I rocked a p4ht, 3.4ghz!, 2gb ram, this build evolved x300 / x800 / x1350512 / hd 4870.

[@honkhonkler7732]

I had a 6800 Ultra! Used it until 2011. It even managed to let me play the earliest versions of Minecraft (lowest settings of course) on my Athlon 64 dual core machine. It unfortunately died shortly after I retired that PC.

[@LastOneLeft99]

I went from Radeon 9700 Pro to the 6800 GT. Big difference in Doom 3.

[@loganiushere]

These videos are so well produced. You need a million subs.

[@ThunderKat]

wish I had that X800 or 6800 back in the days... All I had was a FX5200 and later a Ati 9600, wasn't until got the 9800GT when I could actually enjoy 3D games :S Still I was happy playing diablo 2 with the "3D" enable.

[@cobrastomas]

I think u should make a video about the 8800GTX

[@PixelPipes]

I think I should too.

[@Rennis85]

i still have my ATI x800 pro in my collection :)

[@420Funzzo]

I love all these GPU videos. Bringing back some great memories.

[@jetbrucelee]

I had the x700 at first, didn’t like how it played age of empires 3 and other games that had sm3, so I got a 7800gtx after and was so happy to see my games come to life.

[@onwaybusiness]

please compare GeForce 6800 XT (2006) & Radeon RX 6800 XT (2021)

[@Crf89]

I remember asking for an x800 for 2004 Christmas, but got the 6800 GT(which was still awesome). I didn't know much about PC's back then, and put the card in a system with insufficient power for the card. Long story short, I fried the motherboard...it took 10 trips to best buy before geek squad actually figured that one out lol. For a replacement, my parents bought me a gateway on display, with an ati x300...needless to say, it was definitely less powerful than the 6800 gt, but it did give me years of enjoyment. I believe I actually learned a lot about how gpus work around that time, because I couldn't just crank up the settings lol. I suppose that's why I favor mid rage cards to this day. And good news is, since then I've built 5 PC's, and I haven't fried another board lol

[@GraveUypo]

i went with a 6800GS back then. because AGP. it was awesome. it had much higher clock speeds than the pci-e version, but had 4 locked shaders, which i unlocked. it was basically a 6800 ultra for much, much cheaper. was a considerable upgrade from my defunct 9800pro, let alone from the shitty gf4 ti4400 i was using as a replacement. unfortunatelly my memory of it is a bit tainted because i kept it well into the xbox 360 generation, and this card was much slower than a xbox360 so most games ran like crap. it was already 2008 when i upgraded to a 8600GT and then months later to a 8800gt. what a difference. and to me that sm3 support was a selling point, coming from a shitty geforce 4 a few years back that left me out of playing games because of its outdated shaders. (battlefield 2). i was not about to make the same mistake again.

[@cgrant26]

It was really common back then to get the X800 Pro and flash it to an XT/PE to open up the extra lanes that were locked out on the Pro.

[@metalworksmachineshop]

what would be the best or work very well with a DUAL boot win 98se & XP system.

[@abhinavsharma2626]

Can you tell me the name of the soundtrack from 0:55-2:18 ?

[@Jackpkmn]

It's crazy to think about these cards today. When my main pc ran a GeForce 6200 and my laptop ran X300 graphics at the time.

[@blai5e730]

I had a Leadtek 6800 GT that started artifacting within 2 weeks of purchase and had to be RMA'ed. This process went on for so long (while I languished with my old Geforce MX 440) that the retailer ended up refunding me the full purchase price. With this money I ended up buying a Gainwood 6800 Ultra golden sample and still had $100 left over from my original refund. Win win!

[@hardcore8uk]

I bought the X800 XT PE, still the most expensive card I ever bought at £400, great card that ran everything you through at it. Having SM3 back then wasn't that important because there weren't any games that needed it and also it wasn't ment for that generation, it would be like getting a HD 4870 to run DX11 and playing GTA5, would be slow as hell and you'd have to turn all the settings down.

[@halo37253]

He meant that not having SM3 was not a weakness for the X800XT. As we already know, nearly all games that needed SM3 needs a more powerful GPU than either the X800XT or 6800Ultra.... And you would be better off using a Geforce 8xxxseries card or better for those games. ATI had faster cards compared to Nvidia's FX,6000,7000 series. But Nvidia had better priced mid range options IMO. ATI IMO always cut too much out on their mid range cards for around the same price. Which is why the 6600gt and 7600gt did so well. I actually still have my old x800xt in a box with my old Athlon 64 3500+ and nforce 3 board. Doesn't get much better for playing older games Pre 2006-7 era. Before we started to get mainly xbox360 ports. After that You are better off Running a Core2Quad and a GPU that sits in between a 8800gt and a HD5870. Wide gap I know, but honestly depends on the games you are going to be playing. HD4870/gtx280 would be a good pick for a beefed up XP build. Geforce 7000 and Radeon x1800/x1900 series were great if looking to push frames at higher res on older games, but most of the games that came later in their life spans play better on Next gen cards.

[@halo37253]

Bioshock without the sm2 patch. For Starters.... Nearly all early SM3 games can still be played using SM2. Any game that REQUIRES SM3+ is not going to run nicely on a 6800ultra... Wasn't until around 2008 when games started dropping SM2... So yeah... Like I said. Any game that NEEDS SM3, AKA doesn't work with SM2, going to need something faster than 6800ultra or even any 7000 series Nvidia cards. Nearly all early SM3 games added nothing of value. Hell Pretty much any game post 2006-7 needs a more powerful GPU. Unless you like playing games with mid settings @ 1024x768/1280x1024. Oblivion for example put hurt on even the best of the Nvidia 7000 series and ATI x1800/x1900 series. How about list a Game that can't run on SM2 that runs awesome on a 6800ultra?... I'll wait.

[@halo37253]

There are a few early sm3 games the 6800 ultra can run at some pretty high levels. But my entire point was that the x800xt never needed sm3, as by the time it mattered. It was pointless to continue to use such an old card.... And looks like you agree with that. It was an epic card. Hell both ATI and NVIDIA made amazing cards in this time period. ATI simply just made the faster top end card. And the X800XT was a fair deal faster than 6800ultra in nearly everything. Doom 3 they are close, but add in higher res and AA, and even then the 6800ultra falls behind. But Honestly at 1600x1200 AA isn't really needed. Now My old x800xt never had a problem playing early to mid 2k games @ 1600x1200 with high to max settings while maintaining high/smooth frame rates. I still have the old girl, and it is still a champ for playing old games. Any game that needs more that this old system can putout in decent manor tends to play fine on modern computers. I consider those Xbox 360 and beyond era games, and I can still boot them up just fine on my current rig. Can install Stalker, Oblivion, etc and have it work flawlessly. Plenty of old XP era sim games and whatnot that simply does not work on modern systems without being in a XP VM at the least. Not to mention old 16/32bit windows 9x era games that a good deal of have no problems running under XP. X800XT, Was a damn good card. And the the champ of that generation.

[@halo37253]

PP made another video about SM3 and the 6800 kzbin.info/www/bejne/gZ20l5qJd5h9fNE Not going to lie, nvidia marketed the hell out of having SM3 support. And ATI not having did hurt their sales. Hell it even made me buy a 6600gt back in the day. I only got the x800xt used well after the geforce 7000 series was released. I only knew back then that the x800xt was a whole lot faster than the 6600gt I had before after putting it into my PC. I used that card till I saved up enough to build me a new AM2 Athlon X2 system with a 8800GTS 320. Card Blew me away. The first game that I only really wanted to use SM3 for was Oblivion. But honestly until I got my 8800gts I was playing that game on the xbox 360. The console was crazy powerful for the year it released in, faster than my x800xt for sure. The bloom effect from the 360 was a must for me to play on the PC as well. Made the game so purdy.

[@Sa2si28]

Incredible, and to think that back in the day, the X850 XT was priced at $15, whereas now it costs almost $150!

[@foch3]

I was always impressed with Nvidia's midrange this generation. With the 6600gt having fewer ROP's than shaders it set the stage for the 7800 series doing the same. So many interesting card battles left like 7800 and X1800/1900 or 4870 vs 200 series. Can't wait to see what you come up with.

[@Tom2404]

I have a Geforce 6800. But it's 128MB and has AGP.

[@AiOinc1]

The fact the GeForce needs a gigantic dual slot cooler to get close to the Radeon should tell you all you need to know about nVidia's situation. Radeons are great for overclocking too, and they left themselves plenty of room for that. The reason the cards you saw were so expensive comes down to the fact that they're AGP rather than the more common PCIe. AGP cards are much more fitting of the era and they've become something of a collector's item, raising their prices.

[@RetroAdventure]

Interesting battle! Both are pretty nice units.

[@RetroAdventure]

Nice video by the way!

[@PixelPipes]

Hey thank you!

[@artisankatstudios7902]

I just randomly got a XFX 7800 GS AGP recently. I wonder how it compares to the 6800 Ultra

[@Frankenstainer]

Great review on legendary graphics cards that I couldn't afford back then, thank you, today in 2023 these cards are quite expensive on eBay starting at $100-150, I should have bought one five years ago too.

[@MMMmyshawarma]

Team X800XT PE here. I remember ATI was selling them direct on some crazy ass deal. Was so happy to land it.

[@thepcenthusiastchannel2300]

I had the Asus Radeon x800XT PE (Asus AX800 XT) and I still have it in a Retro PC. I was mostly into Bench-marking and if memory serves me right I was playing World of Warcraft and Half Life 2 back then. The DX9 era belonged to ATi.

[@VdWck]

Thanks for this amazing video, remembering me my 14yo me, enthusiastic on Far Cry and graphic cards I couldn't afford!

[@ThunderKat]

And performance with a weak CPU? Make you wonder if you get better optimization with one or the other.

[@Synthematix]

Trouble is, the 6800gs/ultra etc were 512mb where as the ati was 256mb, meaning the 6800 could play games at 1920x1080, both gpus are the last supported on windows98se

[@VicViperRebirth]

Why did so many cards have dvi instead of vga

[@Daghostie]

I think this was the last generation of ati I used. In the span of 2 years I went from a 9200se to a 9800pro aiw to finally a x800xt. Since than I've been a nvidia fan boy

[@vladmihai306]

Why didn't you test sm 3.0 games?

[@cheshirewarcat5336]

It was my first big upgrade from my first build and I had the bug... Athlon 3800+ with 2x512mb OCZ Gold 533mhz 2-2-2-5 1T and an X850XT. Set me back well over a grand but boy did I spend a lot of time staring at that thing. My 24/7 clocks were 565/1100 btw

[@trompetslet]

I had an AMD XP-M Barton oc-ed to 2750mhz. And 2x 256 MB BH6 @ 250 2-2-2-5 T1, and a gainward 6800 gt goldensample @ 465/1320. Awesome fun modding, overclocking benchmarking and gaming.

[@vansyly9794]

Do any of you guys remember "unlocking pipelines" in the 6800 days? I always wondered if it actually helped with performance.

[@Metalmudo]

I've had pretty good setup in 2004/2005: Athlon 64 3400 +, Asus K8V SE PE Mobo, 3 gb and Sapphire X800 XT ( OC'd to 550/1500 ), really great setup for that time although i regretted to not get multi core cpus later on, but i did upgraded to HD 3850 AGP was fun times

[@PaulSman123]

i HAVE A 6800 gt AND AN x850 XT sitting around. Was thinking of putting them into a rig and seeing how they ran. Good video thoughj. I remember using both of them during the Wrath of Lich king expansion on wow.

[@alrightylol]

For CPU's legendary years was around 2012 when second gen i7 appeared and amd FX 8+ and they still can run most modern games okay.

[@michaellegg9381]

I have a old xfx gs9800 laying around.. it came out of a old dell office pc that had a core 2 duo and 4gb ram it had a dud power supply and its jut sitting around atm ive never used it because i haven't bothered to get a new PSU so im not sure how good or bad the 9800 is in early 2000's Games lol id assume that it's not bad for Doom 3 or halo ect as its got 1gb vram so its got the ram for decent textures and colours and stuff but because i haven't ever used it i actually don't know how it aged or compared to ATI card's i want to see a 9800gs review

[@hwn2831]

As for me decision what to buy was even simplier: if you want for some reason use any professional software like Lightwave, Maya, Edius, AE, not just watch movies or play games - no Radeon allowed. And it's allmost the same now with CUDA everywhere and OpenCL mostly as a marketing trick. Sad to say this. And i was a big fan of a Matrox, but GeForce3 and 4 (my first nvidia cards) made me rethink how actually shitty drivers matrox supplied.

[@MrVitalic85]

I was also there to live it all. My biggest disappointment was finding out my beloved radeon 9800 pro was incompatible with bioshock. This is one of the few card I bought at release and as a young adult it was a lot of money. I then jumped on the xbox 360 bandwagon and came back to pc almost 10 years later with a nvidia gtx 980 to play doom 2016 they way it should be played.

[@cyphaborg6598]

wow that card was not supporting SM 3.0? holy crap.

[@aceofhearts573]

Sadly.... Doom 2016 was made from the ground up to play on consoles and not PC only like back in the day. These are truly dark times.

[@raresmacovei8382]

@@cyphaborg6598 It's an overclocked variant of a 2002 card that the first on the market with Pixel Shader 2.0. Of course it didn't have Pixel Shader 3.0. Was it unfortunate it couldn't play Bioshock, a game released more than 5 years later? Yes. Was it that surprising? Not really. Plus, 9800 XT could still play FEAR + expansions, Oblivion, Gothic 3, Portal, HL2:EP2, Crysis, CoD4, Stalker, Gears of War, Cryostasis and even FEAR 2.

[@KARAOTI23]

Great presentation! So what would you recommend for a proper 2004 build? PCIe or AGP?

[@PixelPipes]

It doesn't make a large difference performance wise, but it does make a difference for price. PCIe, especially the X850XT, is much cheaper.

[@levimaynard2237]

Everything was different. It wasn't the age of hi definition. CRT was everywhere, and all the big TV's were DLP. That was the best time for PC gaming though. Everything that was coming out was new and fresh.

[@jamesoleruster]

Why don't you have more subscribers?

[@PixelPipes]

I just started!

[@supernova874]

nice , i had the x800XT in AGP until my next upgrade that i got the 850XT PE Amazing card , still working i may add :)

[@mauriciochacon]

you could make your bars red for ati, green for nvidia

[@aarongarza4769]

Funny, I see 2004 as the end of the gaming golden era.

[@Igorsov]

Aaron Garza No shit, Sherlock!

[@aceofhearts573]

2004 was the end of the PC golden era of AAA games pushing technology. It tried to come back in 2007 with Crysis but after that all future pc games got made on consoles and then ported to PC (minus rts and mmo) . Even with Steam and indie games it is nothing compared to the old days

[@OscarTheAnimator]

Do you happen to know if the Radeon card is compatible with the HP pavilion a720 desktop pc? I so wanna know if Its possible to turn it into a solid oldschool gaming machine! 👍

[@matt697845]

The base X800 Pro VIVO could be flashed to the full X800XT PE 16 pipelines 520MHz core. The only caveat is the memory usually wouldn't budge over base X800 Pro speeds, so you had to edit a custom X800XT PE BIOS (very easy to do with available tools) with dialed back memory speeds to X800 Pro speeds. Making the base X800 Pro VIVO a very good value buy.

[@sysierius]

I used to have the 6800 ultra mac edition, in my powermac G5

[@Martincic2010]

World of Warcraft on X800 Cold run at 60 fps?

[@ozzytinman941]

Ok thanks lol. Now I have the vintage build bug. I'm going to go all out. Water cooled 775. Or a am2 I have alot of hardware thats just sitting. Any cool ideas? Just found my nx8800gt has a hot girl on it too. You know what I'm talking about?

[@jktwiceft]

Does the Platinum Edition have a special cooler distinguishing it from the Pro version or is it kind of just luck of the draw?

[@PixelPipes]

The sticker on the back will say "PE" on it.

[@jktwiceft]

Well, that's kind of unfortunate. Guess I'll have to look closely at the pictures. Thanks though!

[@solofalcon]

had a Sapphire Radeon 9800Pro 128 from like 2003-2007

[@vomithaus1]

My brother bought an ATI 800 to play Half Life 2 around that time. We went through multiple cards... flashing BIOS's, swapping power supplies... nothing worked. It would just not boot. Finally he bought a 6800 ultra and was up and running in no time. That was my beef with ATI. Might have had better specs, but the damn things were so finicky. I remember playing UT at a lan and watching the guy next to me suffer with his ATI Rage card. I used to think they called it Rage because you got pissed off after you realized what you bought.

[@fuzzycat7313]

I got this card the day of release just to play doom 3 as best i could great times.

[@djust270]

Nathan I just gotta say I love your work! This is by far my favorite channel at the moment. I have watched all the videos, and I'm going through a second time. I recently built my 2002 era fantasy build with an Amd athlon XP and Radeon 9700. I plan on building an Amd phenom system with an 8800 gtx next. Thanks for inspiring me to get back into the retro stuff!

[@Knowbody42]

I remember the 6800 GT had all 16 pixel pipelines unlocked from the factory, while the X800 Pro had 12. You could flash the BIOS of the X800 pro to unlock the full 16 pipelines.

[@dyslectische]

I use a 6800le with only 8 what you can unlock with rivatuner to 16 if you are lucky. Most are stuck on 12. The memory on 6800le is gddr1 and the rest it had gddr3. So for a budget card with unlock its faster than a 6600gt in that time

[@agdwhite5421]

Thank you for this video 😍

[@firefix07]

can u cover the nvidia 7950 gt pls.

[@georgirakidov3798]

I had radeon 9700 til 2007. Big ati fanboy here, but from x800 and 6800u i would pick 6800 because of the feature set. i have both in the collection btw, so no drama :)

[@ThunderKat]

I truly wanna see the video in full-screen but the amount of white pixels is epic on this video, drive me blind lol

[@Yoshimatsu414]

This is around the time I seriously started getting into PC gaming. I remember seeing there cards. Looking at parts and these GPUs when they were coming out when I was like 12. Never got them though lol. I had got together enough money to get a FX 5500 and I was loving that card cause it was my first discrete GPU lol, I played a decent amount of Rainbow 6 Raven Shield on it. The next GPU I had got was a 512MB Radeon X1300. I think I still have that card somewhere, not sure it if works. Still a heavy PC gamer now!!

[@ATomRileyA]

I ordered a low end 6600 card cant remember which one now but it was not a fast one as i could not afford the latest thing but needed a new card, so for Christmas i was waiting for my card but instead got a 800 XT PE in the big box with a webcam and video capture breakout box, i felt bad about this as i figured some other guy got my crappy card instead, so called them up to ask what had happened but they acted like they did not care i don't think they were really listening just put me on hold for 30mins till i gave up lol. Was a pretty good Christmas :) I have been ATI/AMD ever since. Still have that card although i wish i kept the big box it came in, still have all the other accessory's that came with it, although the fan header died on the card so i just used to use it with a pair of 80mm fans strapped to it instead which worked out better for cooling anyway and later went for a waterblock on it, card kept me going for a long while. Was paired with a overclocked and watercooled AMD Athlon XP, got some speed binned chips from a friend who tested 100s of them till he found the good ones. Was great fun that era of gaming and such, which is why i enjoy your videos so much.

[@SanderSander88]

my 6600LE had to do the job haha. nice video!