Review: ATI Radeon X1950 XTX

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Pacific Fighters was run in OpenGL mode with all video options set to high (landscape at perfect) and tested using the “F4Utt” track included with the title. The conf.ini file was edited to enable the two non-4:3 ratio resolutions of 1280x1024 and 1920x1200 and Fraps was used to record the frame rate of each test run.

The X1950 pulls ahead of its predecessor by 7-10% across the tested resolutions, though the frame rate narrowed somewhat at the higher resolutions. As a slightly older title, PF is not stressing the arithmetic capabilities of the ALUs found in the shader cores of these high-end boards so the increased bandwidth helps out to a fairly notable degree at the lower resolutions. Pacific Fighters In addition, both boards saw a 50%+ performance loss from lowest to highest resolution, much of which can be attributed to enabling anisotropic filtering; PF has always seen a high frame rate hit with better texture filtering.

Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2004 was configured with high settings enabled across its four display panels, with the max texture slider set at full and hardware lights at four. SimHQ’s demo is a short dusk flight over Hong Kong city.

MS2004 performs similarly to Pacific Fighters, with the X1950 again outperforming the X1900 by 10% at 1024x768, with that delta dwindling as the resolution scaled upwards. Unfortunately, MS2004 does not render an AA'ed output at 1920x1200, but its easy to see that the performance gap was quickly closing between the two test boards.

A Company of Heroes, the most recent title from Relic Entertainment, is an incredible World War 2 real-time strategy game that offers fantastic visuals. The included performance test found in the graphics configuration section of the title’s menu was used along with Fraps to determine each test board’s performance with this new game; all graphics options were set at their maximum value.

This RTS game separates its performance scores from the two simulations above, producing numbers that are basically identical at 1280x1024 and above. Only at the lowest tested resolution did the X1950 outperform the X1900, and then by less than 5%. Yet both boards lost more than 50% of the recorded frame rate average across the resolution range, making the performance at 1920x1200 of 30fps unplayable for many.

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