ATI's New High End and Mid Range: Radeon X1950 XTX & X1900 XT 256MB
by Derek Wilson on August 23, 2006 9:52 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Performance
We make use of the Lighthouse demo for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. We have been using this benchmark for quite some time and facilitate automation with the scripts published at Beyond 3D. This benchmark is fairly close to in game performance for our system, but midrange users may see a little lower real world performance when tested with a lower speed processor.
Our settings all used the highest quality level possible including the extra SM3.0 features. As the advanced shaders and antialiasing are mutually exclusive under SC:CT, we left AA disabled and focused on the former. We set anisotropic filtering to 8x for all cards.
For this 3rd person stealth game, ultra high frame rates are not necessary. We have a good playing experience at 25 fps or higher. There may be the framerate junkie out there who likes it a little higher, but our recommendation is based on consistency of experience and ability to play the game without a degraded experience.
NVIDIA's 7900 GTX SLI does almost as well as X1900 CrossFire, but the 14% advantage X1950 CF has over X1900 CF puts it way out in front. The 7950 GX2 once again splits the difference between the X1950 XTX and the 7900 GTX SLI.
While X1950 XTX leads all the single-GPU single-card solutions, there really isn't that much difference between the playability of the X1900 XTX, 7900 GTX, and X1900 XT. The extra 256MB of RAM the original X1900 XT has does give it a 7.5% advantage over it's baby brother at this resolution.
ATI leads again in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, both in dual-GPU and single-GPU configurations. Here the GX2 occupies a nice middle ground, and all of the tested cards manage to remain playable up through 2048x1536. Using the "Chuck Patch" it is also possible to enable AA+HDR on ATI hardware, though time constraints and the fact that there is no NVIDIA equivalent caused us to skip this test for now.
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Ecmaster76 - Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - link
Is it a GDDR3 or a DDR2 product?If the former, any chance it will crossfire with x1600 xt? Oficially I mean (methinks a bios flash might work, though x1650 is maybe a 80nm part)
coldpower27 - Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - link
No I don't think that would work.an X1650 Pro has 600/1400 Speeds so 100% sure is GDDR3, DDR2 doesn't exisit at such high clockspeed.
Genx87 - Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - link
Some of the other reviews had this x1950XT beating the GX2 almost every time, sometimes by a wide margin.I still cant get over the power\transistor\die size to performance advantage Nvidia has over ATI right now.
PrinceGaz - Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - link
Interesting. The first review I read was at where the X1950XTX beat or equalled the 7950GX2 every time, then here the reverse is true. I think I'll have to read more reviews to decide what is going on (it certainly isn't CPU limitations). Maybe 's focus on optimum quality settings rather than raw framerate is the reason they favoured ATI, and another is the clear fact that when it came to minimum framerates instead of average framerates ( posted both for all tests) the X1950XTX was especially good.In other words the 7950GX2 posted great average numbers, but the X1950XTX was playable at higher quality settings because the minimum framerate didn't drop so low. Hopefully some other sites also include minimum framerates along with graphs to clearly show the cards perform.
I remember a few years ago when ATs graphics card articles included image-quality comparisons and all sorts of other reports about how the cards compared in real-world situations. Now it seems all we get is a report on average framerate with a short comment that basically says "higher is better". Derek- I strongly suggest you look at how test cards and the informative and useful comments that accompany each graph. There may only have been three cards in their comparison but it gave a much better idea of how the cards compare to each other.
Anyway I'll not be getting any of these cards. My 6800GT has plenty of performance for now so I'll wait until Vista SP1 and the second-generation of DX10 cards which hopfully won't require a 1KW PSU :)
PrinceGaz - Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - link
It seems the comments system here uses the brackets in HardOCP's abbreviation as some sort of marker. Apologies for making the rest of the text invisible, please amend my comment appropriately. I was talking about HardOCP by the way, when I said they use minimum framerates and optimum quality settings for each card.JarredWalton - Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - link
Don't use {H} in the comments, please. Just like {B} turns on bold, {H} turns on highlighting (white text).
JarredWalton - Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - link
Ah, seems you figured that out already. ;) I need to see if we can disable that feature....haris - Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - link
Actually if you look at all of the reviews a bit more closely the sites the scores depend on which processor is being used for the test. It appears that nVidia cards tend to run better on Conroes(probably just means the games are slightly less cpu bottlenecked at the resolutions being tested) while ATi tends to run better on AMD systems(or when the cpu is slowing things down) Of course that is IIRC from the 5 reviews I skimmed through today.coldpower27 - Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - link
No just no X1950 XTX alone is not more powerful then the 7950GX2. Only in ATI favourable scenarios or where SLI flat out doesn't work will this occur.UNESC0 - Wednesday, August 23, 2006 - link
you might want to run dual monitors...