Review: ATI Radeon X1950 XTX

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The latest squad-shooter from the Tom Clancy series, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, supports a plethora of advanced features that gives any graphics board a strenuous workout. All graphics options were placed at their highest setting, and the edge softening feature included in the latest patches was enabled in lieu of control panel anti-aliasing.

GRAW displays a roughly 5% delta between the two test boards at 1024x768, but the X1950 increases its lead to slightly over 10% at the highest resolution. Both boards, however, saw sharp performance dips as the resolution was scaled higher, with the X1900 bordering on unplayable frame rates. While GRAW’s gameplay isn’t as frenetic as pure action shooters, 35fps is probably too low for a first-person perspective game to be enjoyed by most.

Call of Duty 2 was tested with a custom demo from the Prisoners of War single-player map. The game was configured in its DX9 rendering mode with all texture options manually set at Extra.

The X1950 starts out at roughly 6% faster at 1024x768 in Call of Duty 2 and ends at a solid 15% above the X1900. The new board’s increased bandwidth definitely showed an advantage at 1920x1200 and still resulted in a playable frame rate even with the texture options set at Extra.

rFactor was tested with a custom demo recorded on the Lienz, Germany, race track. The DX9 shader profile was selected for all tests.

rFactor is another title that showed little variance in the performance generated by the two test boards. Moreover, scaling the resolution upwards saw a mere 10% decrease in frame rate, indicating that the game is predominantly limited by CPU or system bandwidth. The recorded demo contains a very crowded track and it’s likely that the A.I. and physics in the title are the guilty culprits for the rather CPU-bound frame rates shown above. Yet the X1950 widened its slight lead at the higher resolutions, topping out at almost 10% faster than the X1900 at 1920x1200.

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