Curious about the 6800 Ultra -- your thoughts?

**Siris** · 08-11-2005, 12:41

Well I'll be getting my new laptop soon, a Dell XPS customized to the top by me. Sadley, I cannot get the PC that I had originally planned to build with two 7800 GTX's, 256MB PCI Express video cards, so it has to be one 6800 Ultra 256MB PCI Express video card in my notebook. (have to get it to use in college as well, lol)

So, if anyone here has this card, can you tell me how many units in "Huge" settings (do so through a custom battle) that your PC says it can support without having any loss of video quality with this card?

On my ATI Radeon X700 Pro 256MB PCI Express video card, 1GB of RAM, AMD Athlon-64 3200+, I can support around 6,500 troops on the field at maximum graphics & settings without any loss of video quality.

So I was wondering after seeing the benchmark's of the 6800's at www.tomshardware.com, (along with many other benchmarks), if you have this card, & 1GB to 2GB (my laptop will have 2GB) of RAM, what kind of performance do you see in this amount of units area?

Further more, can you mod your game to have 300 man units, & how does it do with that amount of troops on the field at once?

**Uesugi Kenshin** · 08-11-2005, 15:04

I have a 6800GT and can support somewhere around 11k men on the field with max settings. I have an Athlon64 3500 and 1gigabyte of cas latency 2 RAM.

The video card is not the limiting factor for the number of troops you can support in RTW, the cpu and RAM are far more important. The 6800ULTRA is an excellent card and will support excellent performance in other more video card intensive games such as Half Life 2 and Doom 3.

What CPU will you be getting? How much RAM will your notebook have?

**Siris** · 08-11-2005, 19:04

2GB of RAM, & the CPU is the best that is offered on their site. I would have gotten an AMD Athlon 64-bit, but I'm going to be stuck with this:

Intel® Pentium® M Processor 770 (2.13 GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB)

The best that they offer like I said. Personally I'd prefer an AMD Athlon 64-bit 4000+ but I dont think notebooks come with that lol!

11,000 men? Getting there, so with my stats & card, I should get around 12,000-16,000+ men?

And yes, I know how important everything is in the over all use of a PC, I have taken college courses for PC's before, so I know my stuff for the most part, just want some intel. on what people's exact performances are with their 6800's if they have them.

**sunsmountain** · 08-12-2005, 01:10

Funnily enough, the auto-detect feature never really goes beyond 6400 men on the field before it starts moaning. The biggest problem is video card memory, 128 MB in most cases, 256 MB in a few, and 512 only very rarely.

Now a X800 or a GF6800 would have enough graphics bandwidth/processing power to compensate for any lacking graphics memory, but the auto-detect feature doesnt look at your video card core, all it looks at is:

Processor, (up to 3.0 GHz)
video memory, (up to 512 MB, a little over the top)
and
system memory. (up to 1024 MB)

So simply ignore and go up to 12800 if you have a X800/GF6800 you should be fine.

**Siris** · 08-12-2005, 03:05

Well the laptop will have the 6800 Go Ultra, which was clocked faster than the desktop version, but still a far cry from the twin 7800 GTX's that I had planned for my custom built PC that I was going to get.

Just wondering what kind of higher performance I'd be looking at whenever I get just one 6800 Ultra instead of two of them or two 7800 GTX's.