Introducing the Radeon X1650 XT: A New Mainstream GPU from ATI

Black & White 2 Performance

Black and White 2 was a somewhat disappointing game for us, in that we hoped for much more in terms of gameplay and creature A.I., particularly since we were such fans of the first Black and White. But in spite of its gameplay flaws, the graphics are still some of the best we've seen in any game, and as such it makes a great performance benchmark. Unfortunately, it can be difficult for us to test because of the clunky game interface (especially at higher resolutions) and the fact that we have to use FRAPS to test each resolution.

The frame rates we want to see here for being able to play this game are around 25 FPS or higher. This isn't a fast-paced game really, so some users may find a little lower frame rates acceptable. When we say a game is "playable" at 25 FPS, this just means it's the FPS at which we think the average user would be willing to play it, and still have a fairly enjoyable experience (more or less depending also on the quality of the game).



We see here that again the NVIDIA 7600 GT and ATI X1650 XT get very similar performance in this game, which will be a trend in all of these tests. Because this is a fairly graphically intensive game, the X1650 XT has trouble running it over 1280x1024 resolution. At 27.8 FPS at 1280x1024 you might not run into any problems, but running it at 1024x768 could be safer, especially when dealing with densely populated towns or casting any of the epic miracles.