Benchmarking Old Hardware: A Journey Through the Ages

In this article, we embark on a journey to revisit some of the most iconic games from the past, all running on one of the oldest and most underpowered graphics cards ever made - the 6800 XT. This card is a relic of the early 2000s, known for its poor performance and limited capabilities, yet still capable of playing many older titles at surprisingly high frame rates.

One of the first games we tried was Oblivion, which ran on this card at an astonishing 25 FPS or more. Unlike Skyrim, which struggled to run smoothly on this card, Oblivion's lower visual options allowed it to maintain a respectable frame rate. However, looking up at the sky gave us close to 30 FPS, making it difficult to progress far into the game. This made for an enjoyable but challenging experience, especially when fighting enemies that couldn't fly.

Next up was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which ran smoothly on this card with anti-aliasing turned off completely. The game's frame rate varied depending on the environment, ranging from 40 to 60 FPS in busier areas and 60 to 100 FPS at the beach or in the countryside. This made for a more than pleasant experience, allowing us to enjoy one of our favorite games without any performance issues.

We also revisited some old favorites like Rainbow Six Vegas and Fallout: New Vegas, which ran on this card with surprisingly good results. In Vegas, we saw frame rates drop to around 10 FPS in the game's menus, but inside the New Vegas strip area, the frame rate improved to around 30 FPS. While not ideal, these games were still playable, albeit at a snail's pace.

One of the most memorable experiences was playing Rainbow Six Vegas on this card. The memory of those two games is etched into my brain forever, and I'm glad we could revisit them. They were two of the best games on the 360, and it's amazing how well they still hold up today.

The 6800 XT also ran Fallout: New Vegas surprisingly well, with frame rates improving to around 30 FPS outside of the strip area. This made for a more enjoyable experience, as the game's slower pace allowed us to appreciate its story and atmosphere without any performance issues.

In conclusion, the 6800 XT may be an underpowered graphics card by today's standards, but it still has its charms. For those who are fans of older games or just want to experience what it was like playing on a real old PC, this card is a great option. However, for anyone looking to play modern games at high frame rates, it's not the best choice.

If you're interested in purchasing one of these cards, be aware that they are relatively rare and can be found on used marketplaces like eBay. The card we reviewed cost us £20, which is about £980 cheaper than the cheapest 6800 XT from AMD. However, keep in mind that these cards are totally different things, and it's not recommended to mix and match parts.

Overall, our experience with the 6800 XT was a fun one, allowing us to revisit some of our favorite games from the past. If you're feeling nostalgic or just want to try out older titles, this card is definitely worth checking out.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome to another video now believe it or not amd's 6800 xt isn't the only card with that name allow me to introduce you to this this is nvidia's 6800 xt it reminds me of that when mum says you've got insert item here at home meme oh what's that you want a 6800 xt for your birthday well say no more the main difference between the two is that the amd card is out of stock everywhere or selling secondhand on ebay for over 1 000 pounds this nvidia one cost me just 20. the irony is that it can be just as hard to find despite being the xt model which sounds pretty good it's one of the weaker 6800 series cars in the series with the gto gt gs gt dual and 6800 ultra outperforming it that's a lot of 6800s this card probably lags a tiny bit behind amd's 6800 xt in all seriousness i ran the specs through a gpu comparison site and it told me that on paper the amd card was 60 000 percent better oh dear better see what on earth this ancient thing can do then i actually managed to get this working with the windows 7 drivers on this windows 10 ryzen system driver support ended years ago but the drivers will still install and work fine under the latest windows 10 20 h2 os release recording internally caused frame rate dips and my capture card was incompatible with this hardware so it's the old-fashioned method for capturing gameplay footage today the gpu usage stayed pegged at zero percent here which is incorrect it should read 100 but i think msi afterburner had some compatibility issues with these old drivers though i can't be sure with half-life 2 we turned the settings right up though we disabled anti-aliasing as this caused huge frame dips with the 6800 xt that feels weird to say and i bet that not many reviewers this month have said that their 6800 xd struggles to play half life smoothly i like the way we're just using about five percent of the ryzen's power if this was a person it would be falling asleep revisiting the classic that is the elder scrolls oblivion worked out quite well this is very much a 720p or lower graphics card at this point in time but at this resolution it's not going to have any problems with games of a similar age i was a little daring with the graphic settings and went for medium instead of low which still meant a 30 plus fps average outside of towns anyway busier areas and combat situations will drop that figure down towards the low 20s which doesn't feel too bad as it picks up again quite quickly but for the most part you should be able to enjoy this legendary game on this hardware with of course some graphical sacrifices surprisingly cs go even fired up though it resembled more of a powerpoint presentation than an actual game we were getting about one fps at 720p and later on i dropped the resolution to 640 by 480 where we saw about eight or nine fps instead so it was way better at the lower resolution but still not playable even for me and to be honest i'd be happy with 25 fps or more unlike oblivion skyrim will cause huge issues for the 6800 xt as well here once again we were running the game at 1280x720 with the lowest visual options and going into the advanced options i also set all the distance sliders to their lowest as well i found that looking up at the sky gave us close to 30 fps but yeah you probably aren't going to be able to progress very far into the game if your character is always looking up it's fine for fighting a dragon but not so fine for fighting enemies that can't fly which is pretty much everything else so there we go in grand theft auto san andreas the low settings meant a plus 100 fps experience but i decided to be a little more ambitious and go for very high albeit with anti-aliasing turned off completely there were still some moments whereby we hit that 100 fps figure but for the most part the game sat at around 40 to 60 in busier areas and 60 to 100 at the beach or in the countryside i still love this game will san andreas ever be topped who knows but every time i end up benchmarking it i get distracted and then i play it for an hour or two before realizing that i'm supposed to be working that's the power of a timeless classic i guess so the footage here is taken from a game that roughly resembles battlefield bad company 2 though at this point the two in the game's title could also refer to the number of frames per second that we're seeing that's probably a bit harsh it was more like 5 fps but what's deceiving here is that for about three seconds the intro sequence ran at 30 fps before dropping down to this figure so i thought we might get a playable experience it's like when you fire up the witcher 3 on low end hardware and you're getting about a thousand fps at the main menu and you think oh it's going to be quite good and then you get into the game on a low end graphics card and you get about 10 fps next up i tried another favorite of mine rainbow six vegas i played this one and the sequel years ago on the 360 and the memory of them is just burnt into my brain forever these were the two games that really made me appreciate the 360 and i remember looking in all at the visuals i'd still recommend playing these games just not with a g4 6800 xt that's all unless you don't mind 10 fps while we're on the subject of vegas fallout new vegas also ran on this card and it ran better than rainbow six inside the new vegas strip area the frame rate didn't do so well but it's sort of playable i guess new vegas is a slow paced sort of game but i might be a little biased because i first played it on ps3 years ago and then i played it with an 8400 gs on pc so i'm used to experiencing it with low frame rates if we venture outside of the strip which should be a little less demanding then we do see the frame rate improve and sit closer to 30 though 25 is probably a more realistic expectation but there we go a 6800 xt you can actually buy and a 6800 xt that is far more affordable for a lot of people as well albeit a lot worse in terms of performance should you buy one no but if like me older games are more your thing then it makes for an okay retro buy and if you want something that's going to handle those older pre-2005 titles with ease then you should consider one of these cards will i review the actual 6800xt well perhaps in 10 years time when the card might be available and when i can find one on the used market for a decent price this one was actually pretty fun to mess around with there are plenty of retro games that will run just fine on this card of course san andreas being a pretty good example of that as well as older half-life games and even oblivion if you don't mind a few visual sacrifices i haven't seen many of these cards around on sites like ebay this one cost me 20 pounds as i said before which is about 980 pounds cheaper than the cheapest 6800 xd from amd but of course they are totally different things and this was just for a bit of fun all that's left to say then is thank you very much for watching if you enjoyed this video leave a like on it leave a dislike if you didn't subscribe to the channel then uh if you haven't done so already leave your thoughts down below on this card let me know if you've ever owned one or perhaps you've owned something in the 6800 series because it's a big series of cards and uh yeah hopefully i'll see you all in the next onehello everyone and welcome to another video now believe it or not amd's 6800 xt isn't the only card with that name allow me to introduce you to this this is nvidia's 6800 xt it reminds me of that when mum says you've got insert item here at home meme oh what's that you want a 6800 xt for your birthday well say no more the main difference between the two is that the amd card is out of stock everywhere or selling secondhand on ebay for over 1 000 pounds this nvidia one cost me just 20. the irony is that it can be just as hard to find despite being the xt model which sounds pretty good it's one of the weaker 6800 series cars in the series with the gto gt gs gt dual and 6800 ultra outperforming it that's a lot of 6800s this card probably lags a tiny bit behind amd's 6800 xt in all seriousness i ran the specs through a gpu comparison site and it told me that on paper the amd card was 60 000 percent better oh dear better see what on earth this ancient thing can do then i actually managed to get this working with the windows 7 drivers on this windows 10 ryzen system driver support ended years ago but the drivers will still install and work fine under the latest windows 10 20 h2 os release recording internally caused frame rate dips and my capture card was incompatible with this hardware so it's the old-fashioned method for capturing gameplay footage today the gpu usage stayed pegged at zero percent here which is incorrect it should read 100 but i think msi afterburner had some compatibility issues with these old drivers though i can't be sure with half-life 2 we turned the settings right up though we disabled anti-aliasing as this caused huge frame dips with the 6800 xt that feels weird to say and i bet that not many reviewers this month have said that their 6800 xd struggles to play half life smoothly i like the way we're just using about five percent of the ryzen's power if this was a person it would be falling asleep revisiting the classic that is the elder scrolls oblivion worked out quite well this is very much a 720p or lower graphics card at this point in time but at this resolution it's not going to have any problems with games of a similar age i was a little daring with the graphic settings and went for medium instead of low which still meant a 30 plus fps average outside of towns anyway busier areas and combat situations will drop that figure down towards the low 20s which doesn't feel too bad as it picks up again quite quickly but for the most part you should be able to enjoy this legendary game on this hardware with of course some graphical sacrifices surprisingly cs go even fired up though it resembled more of a powerpoint presentation than an actual game we were getting about one fps at 720p and later on i dropped the resolution to 640 by 480 where we saw about eight or nine fps instead so it was way better at the lower resolution but still not playable even for me and to be honest i'd be happy with 25 fps or more unlike oblivion skyrim will cause huge issues for the 6800 xt as well here once again we were running the game at 1280x720 with the lowest visual options and going into the advanced options i also set all the distance sliders to their lowest as well i found that looking up at the sky gave us close to 30 fps but yeah you probably aren't going to be able to progress very far into the game if your character is always looking up it's fine for fighting a dragon but not so fine for fighting enemies that can't fly which is pretty much everything else so there we go in grand theft auto san andreas the low settings meant a plus 100 fps experience but i decided to be a little more ambitious and go for very high albeit with anti-aliasing turned off completely there were still some moments whereby we hit that 100 fps figure but for the most part the game sat at around 40 to 60 in busier areas and 60 to 100 at the beach or in the countryside i still love this game will san andreas ever be topped who knows but every time i end up benchmarking it i get distracted and then i play it for an hour or two before realizing that i'm supposed to be working that's the power of a timeless classic i guess so the footage here is taken from a game that roughly resembles battlefield bad company 2 though at this point the two in the game's title could also refer to the number of frames per second that we're seeing that's probably a bit harsh it was more like 5 fps but what's deceiving here is that for about three seconds the intro sequence ran at 30 fps before dropping down to this figure so i thought we might get a playable experience it's like when you fire up the witcher 3 on low end hardware and you're getting about a thousand fps at the main menu and you think oh it's going to be quite good and then you get into the game on a low end graphics card and you get about 10 fps next up i tried another favorite of mine rainbow six vegas i played this one and the sequel years ago on the 360 and the memory of them is just burnt into my brain forever these were the two games that really made me appreciate the 360 and i remember looking in all at the visuals i'd still recommend playing these games just not with a g4 6800 xt that's all unless you don't mind 10 fps while we're on the subject of vegas fallout new vegas also ran on this card and it ran better than rainbow six inside the new vegas strip area the frame rate didn't do so well but it's sort of playable i guess new vegas is a slow paced sort of game but i might be a little biased because i first played it on ps3 years ago and then i played it with an 8400 gs on pc so i'm used to experiencing it with low frame rates if we venture outside of the strip which should be a little less demanding then we do see the frame rate improve and sit closer to 30 though 25 is probably a more realistic expectation but there we go a 6800 xt you can actually buy and a 6800 xt that is far more affordable for a lot of people as well albeit a lot worse in terms of performance should you buy one no but if like me older games are more your thing then it makes for an okay retro buy and if you want something that's going to handle those older pre-2005 titles with ease then you should consider one of these cards will i review the actual 6800xt well perhaps in 10 years time when the card might be available and when i can find one on the used market for a decent price this one was actually pretty fun to mess around with there are plenty of retro games that will run just fine on this card of course san andreas being a pretty good example of that as well as older half-life games and even oblivion if you don't mind a few visual sacrifices i haven't seen many of these cards around on sites like ebay this one cost me 20 pounds as i said before which is about 980 pounds cheaper than the cheapest 6800 xd from amd but of course they are totally different things and this was just for a bit of fun all that's left to say then is thank you very much for watching if you enjoyed this video leave a like on it leave a dislike if you didn't subscribe to the channel then uh if you haven't done so already leave your thoughts down below on this card let me know if you've ever owned one or perhaps you've owned something in the 6800 series because it's a big series of cards and uh yeah hopefully i'll see you all in the next one\n"