ATI's New Leader in Graphics Performance: The Radeon X1900 Series
by Derek Wilson & Josh Venning on January 24, 2006 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Day of Defeat Performance
Day of Defeat uses Valve's new HDR technology on the Halflife 2 engine, which makes this game a good performance benchmark. One of the most interesting things to note here is how much of a performance hit NVIDIA takes when maximum quality settings are enabled in the control panel. Specifically, the 7800 GTX 512 gets roughly half the framerate with the max settings enabled as without.
With this game, we've omitted tests without AA enabled because there tends to be a CPU limitation on higher-end cards. Notice that while ATI gets only slightly better scores with AA enabled than NVIDIA, when maximum quality is enabled in the driver, the gap widens considerably and ATI does a much better job across resolutions. ATI gets playable framerates at the highest resolutions with the maximum quality enabled, but without an sli setup, NVIDIA can't really manage similar settings (18.9 fps at 2048x1536 with max quality and 22 fps at 1920x1440 with max quality).
Day of Defeat uses Valve's new HDR technology on the Halflife 2 engine, which makes this game a good performance benchmark. One of the most interesting things to note here is how much of a performance hit NVIDIA takes when maximum quality settings are enabled in the control panel. Specifically, the 7800 GTX 512 gets roughly half the framerate with the max settings enabled as without.
With this game, we've omitted tests without AA enabled because there tends to be a CPU limitation on higher-end cards. Notice that while ATI gets only slightly better scores with AA enabled than NVIDIA, when maximum quality is enabled in the driver, the gap widens considerably and ATI does a much better job across resolutions. ATI gets playable framerates at the highest resolutions with the maximum quality enabled, but without an sli setup, NVIDIA can't really manage similar settings (18.9 fps at 2048x1536 with max quality and 22 fps at 1920x1440 with max quality).
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Harkonnen - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Almost $900 CDN for the XTX and it only has a 1 year warranty?Main reason I would never buy an expensive ATi card is that right there.
smitty3268 - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
The people who buy a card this expensive the first day it comes out won't keep it for a whole year, so the warranty doesn't matter. In 6 months another card will be out that makes this one look slow and they'll be spending even more money.DerekWilson - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Due to popular demand, we have added more percent increase performance comparison graphs to the performance breakdown that shows the performance relatoinships at lower resolutions.Let us know if there is anything else you'd like to see. Thanks!
Live - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
The performance breakdown looks very good now! I would go so far as to say that this should be standard in future reviews.piroroadkill - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Using a lossy image format (JPEG) for image quality comparison screenshots seems kind of... pointless.But I guess you have to worry about bandwidth.
Josh Venning - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Thanks for the input all. Just to let you know we are dealing with some problems regarding our power numbers, but they should be up shortly. Thanks for being patient.Josh Venning - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
One more thing.. We also caught a mistype on the graphs that we are in the process of correcting. The two crossfire systems we tested are the X1900 XTX Crossfire and the X1800 XT Crossfire. (we miss-labeled the latter "X1900 XT Crossfire") Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.smitty3268 - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Ah... That makes much more sense now. I was wondering why the XTX crossfire was doing so much better than the XT crossfire when the specs were so similar.SpaceRanger - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Problems with the publishing of them, or problems in the sense that it requires a direct link into a nuclear reactor to power properly??
DerekWilson - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
our local nuclear plant ran us an extention cord just for this event :-)