Introducing the Radeon X1650 XT: A New Mainstream GPU from ATI
by Josh Venning on October 30, 2006 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Performance
Many times we preface our tests with comments about the game we are testing, and Oblivion just happens to be one that we can't say enough good things about. There still isn't much out there in the way of competition to this game just in terms of graphical intensity, but we would also say it's one of the richest, most beautiful, and most involving RPGs we've ever played for the PC.
Because the terrain is so varied, we came up with a few different benchmarks within the game to test different environments. Much of the gameplay is spent in caves and dark ruins so this was one of the tests. Another test was in a snowy village outside with a few NPCs around. The last test was out in the wilderness at night, surrounded by a few fireball-shooting enemies, and walking towards an impressive Oblivion gate, which makes use of a lot of the game's lighting and fire effects. This last test is the most demanding on our graphics cards, so this was the benchmark we've chosen to include for these performance tests.
Oblivion thankfully allows extensive control over the graphics quality settings in the game, and most users will find it necessary to tweak these settings to some degree to find the best setting for their system. These are the quality settings we used for these tests.
With the settings turned up to their highest, the game is truly breathtaking, and conversely, if certain key settings are turned down to their lowest (for example, view distance), the game loses much in the way of aesthetics, and more importantly loses a lot of enjoyable gameplay. For this reason, we don't really recommend trying to play this game if your graphics card is at all low-end.
While playing this game, the FPS has a tendency to sometimes slow down a lot. For instance, when you come near an Oblivion gate and suddenly several scamps spawn out of it and start attacking you, the potential for a frame rate drop is very high. Generally though, an average frame rate of about 20 or higher in our test is good enough to enjoy the game; any lower than this would be risky and probably would take away from the gameplay. While it isn't generally a very fast-paced game (a twitch-shooter it isn't) there are times when you need to act fast, and choppy frame rates will definitely hinder this.
We can see here first off how graphically intense this game is compared to the previous two. This particular benchmark is so demanding that only the most powerful graphics cards could hope to run it at 1600x1200 and up (with high quality settings). With Oblivion, we would generally recommend playing it at a lower resolution with the quality settings as high as possible, as this way the game still looks very good.
An interesting thing about Oblivion is that it favors ATI hardware over NVIDIA, and this is evident here when we look at the X1650 XT compared with the 7600 GT. In this case, the X1650 XT has a small but significant performance lead over the 7600 GT. Because of this, the X1650 XT is more likely to be playable at 1024x768 than the 7600 GT. This is one case where the X1650 XT clearly beats the 7600 GT just in terms of performance. Oblivion players may want to consider this card once it's available, but only assuming the price is reasonable.
Many times we preface our tests with comments about the game we are testing, and Oblivion just happens to be one that we can't say enough good things about. There still isn't much out there in the way of competition to this game just in terms of graphical intensity, but we would also say it's one of the richest, most beautiful, and most involving RPGs we've ever played for the PC.
Because the terrain is so varied, we came up with a few different benchmarks within the game to test different environments. Much of the gameplay is spent in caves and dark ruins so this was one of the tests. Another test was in a snowy village outside with a few NPCs around. The last test was out in the wilderness at night, surrounded by a few fireball-shooting enemies, and walking towards an impressive Oblivion gate, which makes use of a lot of the game's lighting and fire effects. This last test is the most demanding on our graphics cards, so this was the benchmark we've chosen to include for these performance tests.
Oblivion thankfully allows extensive control over the graphics quality settings in the game, and most users will find it necessary to tweak these settings to some degree to find the best setting for their system. These are the quality settings we used for these tests.
| Oblivion Performance Settings | |
| Texture Size | Large |
| Tree Fade | 100% |
| Actor Fade | 100% |
| Item Fade | 66% |
| Object Fade | 90% |
| Grass Distance | 50% |
| View Distance | 100% |
| Distant Land | On |
| Distant Buildings | On |
| Distant Trees | On |
| Interior Shadows | 95% |
| Exterior Shadows | 85% |
| Self Shadows | On |
| Shadows on Grass | On |
| Tree Canopy Shadows | On |
| Shadow Filtering | High |
| Specular Distance | 100% |
| HDR Lighting | On |
| Bloom Lighting | Off |
| Water Detail | High |
| Water Reflections | On |
| Water Ripples | On |
| Window Reflections | On |
| Blood Decals | High |
| Anti-aliasing | Off |
With the settings turned up to their highest, the game is truly breathtaking, and conversely, if certain key settings are turned down to their lowest (for example, view distance), the game loses much in the way of aesthetics, and more importantly loses a lot of enjoyable gameplay. For this reason, we don't really recommend trying to play this game if your graphics card is at all low-end.
While playing this game, the FPS has a tendency to sometimes slow down a lot. For instance, when you come near an Oblivion gate and suddenly several scamps spawn out of it and start attacking you, the potential for a frame rate drop is very high. Generally though, an average frame rate of about 20 or higher in our test is good enough to enjoy the game; any lower than this would be risky and probably would take away from the gameplay. While it isn't generally a very fast-paced game (a twitch-shooter it isn't) there are times when you need to act fast, and choppy frame rates will definitely hinder this.
We can see here first off how graphically intense this game is compared to the previous two. This particular benchmark is so demanding that only the most powerful graphics cards could hope to run it at 1600x1200 and up (with high quality settings). With Oblivion, we would generally recommend playing it at a lower resolution with the quality settings as high as possible, as this way the game still looks very good.
An interesting thing about Oblivion is that it favors ATI hardware over NVIDIA, and this is evident here when we look at the X1650 XT compared with the 7600 GT. In this case, the X1650 XT has a small but significant performance lead over the 7600 GT. Because of this, the X1650 XT is more likely to be playable at 1024x768 than the 7600 GT. This is one case where the X1650 XT clearly beats the 7600 GT just in terms of performance. Oblivion players may want to consider this card once it's available, but only assuming the price is reasonable.
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cornfedone - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link
If people stop buying over-priced, over-hyped graphics cards the prices will come down. If people stop pre-ordering paper launched video, mobo, and other PC products, the prices will come down. As long as consumers act stupid and spend money like a drunken sailor then they will be exploited by unscrupulous companies.yacoub - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link
This will not change until after the recession/crash, possible depression, that is coming soon.Niv KA - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link
There is a quote I remember, but I don't know from who or the exact quote itselfI'm not sure if it was 80% or the quote was structured that way, I just remember hearing it somewhere... not reading, hearing, from someone important, but I forgot who!
yacoub - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link
Funny having to go to the Crossfire graphs to see how the 7900GT (non SLI) performs compared to it. The end result: Another budget card that seems rather pointless these days when anyone spending $200 on a GPU should be getting something that can at least play these games that are two years old without having to sacrifice framerates so much. Come on now...Spoelie - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link
x1650pro still is competition for 7600gs. x1950pro in europe has an okay price (lowest around €180), but availability a bit tight. 7600gt sli benches missing from battlefield graph!viperboy2025 - Tuesday, October 31, 2006 - link
Anandtech are on crack or something, or they woke up on the bad ATI side in the morning cause they kept bashing them for around 3 or more pages about the price of x1950 pro nto being the said $200 but being $300. I've actually bought one for $205 yesterday recently and there are other ones selling at similar price...$203.99 - (from zipzoomflt.com actually went down by $1 from when i bought it 2 days ago)...Sapphire RADEON X1950 PRO 256MB PCI-Express Dual-DVI, HDTV-Out Retail FREE SHIPPING
$199.99 - (from zipzoomfly..currently out of stock though) Asus EAX1950PRO/HTDP/256M Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB PCI-Express Dual-DVI, HDTV-Out Retail ***Free Shipping***
$199.99 - also from zipzoomfly are x1950 pro from makers of Connect3D and Diamond Viper - (this one is actually higher core clocked to 600MHz rather than 575)
Only cards on zipzoomfly that are over $200 are one from Gigabyte which is $229.99 but its out of stock so its useless anyways considering there are many others to choose from. There is also one manufactured by ATI themselves but who would buy that considering its at stock speeds and $279.99, $80 above all those other cards...
Newegg also has the saphire card at $199.99 plus shipping, and it also offers the ATI version at a ridicously overpriced price which is stupid for anyone to go for considering you can get the same card, higher clocked from a different manufacturer for $80 less and shouldn't be taken seriously by anandtech enough to bash ATI for 3-4 pages about all their 1950 pro cards being close to $300 and not near $200 as they promised. Since only one version of that card is offered at an insane inflated price.
The $200 dollar saphire is also available from pcconnection.com
viperboy2025 - Tuesday, October 31, 2006 - link
i know this was a 1650xt pro review but to add another thing anandtech keeps commenting about is that, the x1950 pro is competitive (actually they do they its also better) than the nvidia 7900 GS given their similar price similarity but if you looked at the performance charts some reviews ago about the x1950 pro it is actually very competitive with the 7900GT as a single card solution and they are nearly the same, but the GT costs $300 so in other words ATI owned 7900GT and the lower end 7900GS variant which is so outperformed that it shouldn't even be mentioned, unless you are going to SLi route which is the only thing that helps nvidia cards scale better against ATI crossfire, NVIDIA lost that battle. But one thing to keep in mind is SLI motherboards are way more expansive than single pci-e solution cards, so if you have a big purse, you should be looking for a more powerful card anyways if you haven't gotten one already, also SLI is not really a worth it (value) solution since it would require you to dish out about $400 for 2 7900GS cards or $550-600 for 2 7900GT cards, if you have that kind of money you should be buying a more powerfulful and mroe high-end card anyways, as most review sites will tell you if money allows, always go for a more powerful card rather than doing SLI/crossfire, since those are only options for future upgrades if you are running low on graphics power rather than being a real/viable current graphics solution. (eg the nvidia $500 7950GX2 SLI on 1 card is a better solution than 2 7900GT cards, and you don't even need an SLI mobo for it since it uses one PCI-e lane)kalrith - Tuesday, October 31, 2006 - link
The 7900GT hasn't cost $300 in quite some time. At ZZF you can get it for either http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?Pr...">$200 after a $20 MIR or http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?Pr...">$190 after a $40 MIR. The $200 one is overclocked from 470/1.37GHz to 500/1.5GHz, which might be enough to put the 7900GT in the lead over the X1950PRO.Either way, both are good cards, and both are the same price. I just wanted to clear things up and say that the following statement is false: "the GT costs $300 so in other words ATI owned 7900GT".
viperboy2025 - Friday, November 3, 2006 - link
btw i got my new ATI card saphire x1950 pro and its great....it comes clocked at (core/memory) 581 MHz/701MHz (x2=1402 Mhz effective memory) which is faster than the 7900GT. I also easily got the ATI card to overlock to 621Mhz/781 x2 = 1562 Mhz effective, which makes this card incredibly fast...if you wanted to get a graphx card that will last you a good two years for games or more look no further, it even comes at a great price of only $200.JarredWalton - Monday, October 30, 2006 - link
BF2 7600 GT SLI performance is now added to the top graph. It was in the scaling graph but somehow left out of the 1600x1200-only chart.