by Guest Writer “Bill Son of Hew” Hewett Introduction Anyone who has spent any time around the SimHQ and CH Hanger forums well knows the affable and most helpful Ken “531 Ghost” King. A hands on, ‘can do’, type of former Marine (aren’t we all?), Ken molds the materials he has at hand into unique […]
Back to Page 8 Conclusions Despite the similiarites in the number of functional units between the Radeon X800 XT and X1800 XT, there is little doubt that ATI’s new architecture is considerably more efficient than the company’s previous generation. While the 25% core clock speed and 50% increase in memory bandwidth (and doubled onboard […]
Back to Page 7 Higher Image Quality Test Scores The beginning of Call of Duty 2’s Prisoner of War map contains lots of transparent textures due to the grass, bushes, and trees scattered across this portion of the level. SimHQ’s custom demo thus represents a good test for ATI’s Adaptive AA support. AAA has […]
Back to Page 4 Lock On: Flaming Cliffs was tested using the “SU-25T vs. two A-10” replay with the graphics settings at high (heat blrs off). Flaming Cliffs produced playable frame rates for all three test boards across the four resolutions. The test scores, in fact, appear to be heavily processor-limited since the X1800 outperforms […]
Back to Page 6 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 high. As with Chaos Theory, Call of Duty 2 likewise sees the X1600 struggling to produce playable frame […]
Back to Page 3 Test System Setup The graphics boards tested for this article were installed in an Antec Sonata midtower case and the testbed built using the following components: AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (2.6 GHz dual core) ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe motherboard (nForce4 chipset) 2 GB (2 x 1 GB) of Corsair DDR400 […]
Back to Page 5 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 of a short dusk flight over Hong Kong city. Again, the three boards gave playable frame rates across the tested […]
Back to Page 2 Bright Lights – Image Quality Improvements Despite the obvious need for improved efficiency, image quality and video output is of great importance for graphics boards, and ATI has improved upon their previous parts with the Radeon X1000 family in a number of ways. First, the company has introduced a new […]
Back to Page 1 Shader effects are all the rage these days, and there’s little doubt that the bottleneck in graphically-intensive titles is more and more the amount of math graphics chips must perform to render these effects. Rendering more sophisticated effects requires more shaders with longer instructions, thus making efficient use of their […]
by John Reynolds Introduction In the fall of 2002, ATI was the first graphics company to reach the market with a DX9 product, the Radeon 9700 Pro. Building on the subsequent success of that chip, ATI, largely through the use of process technology, extended the basic architecture of the 9700 Pro across several generations of […]
