ATI Radeon X1950 Pro: CrossFire Done Right
by Derek Wilson on October 17, 2006 6:22 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Black & White 2 Performance
The AnandTech benchmark for Black & White 2 is a FRAPS benchmark. Between
the very first tutorial land and the second land there is a pretty well
rounded cut scene rendered in-game. This benchmark is indicative of real world
performance in Black & White 2. We are able to see many of the commonly
rendered objects in action. The most stressful part of the benchmark is a
scene where hundreds of soldiers come running over a hill, which really pounds
the geometry capabilities of these cards. At launch, ATI cards were severely
outmatched when it came to B&W2 performance because of this scene, but two
patches applied to the game and quite a few Catalyst revisions later give ATI
cards a much needed boost in performance over what we first saw.
A desirable average framerate for Black & White 2 is anything over 20 fps.
The game does remain playable down to the 17-19 fps range, but we usually
start seeing the occasional annoying hiccup during gameplay here. While this
isn't always a problem as far as getting things done and playing the game, any
jerkiness in frame rate degrades the overall experience.
We did test with all the options on the highest quality settings under the
custom menu. Antialiasing has quite a high performance hit in this game, and
is generally not worth it at high resolutions unless the game is running on a
super powerhouse of a graphics card. If you're the kind of person who just
must have AA enabled, you'll have to settle for a little bit lower resolution
than we tend to like on reasonably priced graphics cards. Black & White 2
is almost not worth playing at low resolutions without AA, depth of field, or
bloom enabled. At that point, we tend to get image quality that resembles the
original Black & White. While various people believe that the original was
a better game, no one doubts the superiority of B&W2's amazing
graphics.
As with Battlefield 2, we see performance on par with the 7900 GT. In this case, the X1950 Pro actually equals the performance of the X1900 XT 256MB. It seems like either geometry or memory (or both) are the major factors in performance here. Again, CrossFire offers a good boost over single card performance exceeding the high end single card solutions from both manufacturers, but 7900 GS SLI still comes back from behind in the singe card race to beat CrossFire.
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Spoelie - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
It might be a good idea to use omega's drivers, they do not include catalyst control center but instead use ati tray tools OR the old control panel slightly updated. The only downside to this is that omega's are sometimes one or two releases behind the official ones.if you're not comfortable with omega's drivers (even though they're rock solid :)) you can always download just the driver from ati and install ati tray tools seperatly. it includes every option you need to change driver settings etc but is a sleek minimalist fast 1mb tool :)
JarredWalton - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Unfortunately, CCC is required to enable CrossFire. I don't know if Omega gets around this requirement somehow, but the standard ATI control panel drivers do not have the CrossFire checkbox anywhere.Aikouka - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
The awkward drivers is actually the main reason I steer clear of ATi still. Also, I get a bit annoyed at the company as they only seem to care about their graphics sector and ignore all of their other products. My ATi TV Wonder Pro Remote Control Edition had so many problems over the years that it was barely worth owning. The Remote Control software just crashes randomly still.Although, I have yet to try the newest version of the software, because I removed the card from my system and it won't let you install the main software without it.
So... with my experience, it leaves me a bit wary.
But I do also have to admit how much I also don't like the newer nVidia control panel, but at least I can go back to the original one with one mouse click :).
DerekWilson - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Right on.Zaitsev - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Typo on page 2, third paragraph."It is hard enough for us to sort things out when parts hit the selves at different speeds..."
RamarC - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
suggestion: replace Q4 and B&W2 with Prey and Company of HeroesDerekWilson - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
We are planning on doing exactly that starting in early November.spe1491 - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Possible typo?-
Basilisk - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
Further clue: try "heartily"; "hardily" means "ruggedly", etc..Spoelie - Tuesday, October 17, 2006 - link
After browsing through some other reviews, all which seem to use the Catalyst 6.9 drivers, it occured to me that they all have significantly lower performance for the ATi camp then what anandtech is reporting.Most reviews place 7900gs performance well above that of the x1950pro in quake 4. Can anyone explain to me why that is, and the supposed opengl/doom3 optimisations are only being seen by AT and not by sites such as bit-tech, hardocp, the tech report, firing squad, etc. ??