3Dmark03 shows us that Nvidia is just ahead of ATi at a 1024x768 resolution, the GeForce 6800 Ultra beats the Radeon X800 XT by almost 7%, that lead remains at around 7% at higher resolutions. Although 3Dmark2001 SE is an older benchmark and only supports DirectX 8.0 it is a good measure of how new graphics cards perform with older games. Here the Radeon X800 XT shows some muscle and clocks in 5.5% faster, which is to be expected as the Radeon X800 XT is based on the older R300 and R360 architectures, whereas Nvidia has a new architecture with no optimizations for DirectX 8.0.

AquaMark3 shows that complicated DirectX 9.0 calculations is indeed where the GeForce 6800 Ultra shines, it is 11% faster than the Radeon X800 XT, when we run the same benchmark again, but now with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering both cards clock in the same score. From these industry standard synthetic benchmark scores it is safe to say that both the Radeon X800 XT and the GeForce 6800 Ultra have excellent scores. However we all know that the true measure of performance is with actual game play, a benchmark is just that, a benchmark.