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
Black and White 2 Performance
Black and White 2 is a god sim with a very sophisticated graphics and physics engine. One thing very interesting about this game is the advanced in-game Anti-Aliasing option. While, only offering "low", "medium" and "high" AA settings, the game's AA looks surprisingly good, as we will show under the image quality section.
Here with Black and White 2, NVIDIA does quite a bit better than ATI. It would be an understatement to say that this game favors NVIDIA over ATI due to the before-mentioned problem ATI has with this game. Not only do the 1900s perform much lower than the GTX (without AA), but the performance actually becomes worse when Crossfire is enabled. Keep in mind though that ATI has promised a patch, and this issue will hopefully be resolved soon.
Also, Black and White 2 just happens to be possibly the most graphically intensive of our games in this review, so NVIDIA's parts struggle at high resolutions and with AA significantly. This game appears to put even the mighty 7800 GTX 512 sli setup to task, but we still see a playable framerate at the highest resolution with AA enabled. Note that we did not include maximum quality tests here because the in-game AA did a far greater job at image quality with not nearly the same drop in performance.
Black and White 2 is a god sim with a very sophisticated graphics and physics engine. One thing very interesting about this game is the advanced in-game Anti-Aliasing option. While, only offering "low", "medium" and "high" AA settings, the game's AA looks surprisingly good, as we will show under the image quality section.
Here with Black and White 2, NVIDIA does quite a bit better than ATI. It would be an understatement to say that this game favors NVIDIA over ATI due to the before-mentioned problem ATI has with this game. Not only do the 1900s perform much lower than the GTX (without AA), but the performance actually becomes worse when Crossfire is enabled. Keep in mind though that ATI has promised a patch, and this issue will hopefully be resolved soon.
Also, Black and White 2 just happens to be possibly the most graphically intensive of our games in this review, so NVIDIA's parts struggle at high resolutions and with AA significantly. This game appears to put even the mighty 7800 GTX 512 sli setup to task, but we still see a playable framerate at the highest resolution with AA enabled. Note that we did not include maximum quality tests here because the in-game AA did a far greater job at image quality with not nearly the same drop in performance.
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bob4432 - Thursday, January 26, 2006 - link
Good for ATI, after some issues in the not so distant past it looks like the pendulum has swung back in their direction.i really like this, it should drop the 7800GT prices down maybe to the ~$200-$220(hoping, as nvidia want to keep the market hold...) which would actually give me a reason to switch to some flavor of pci-e based m/b, but being display limited @ 1280x1024 with a lcd, my x800xtpe is still chugging along nicely :)
Spoelie - Thursday, January 26, 2006 - link
it won't, they're in a different pricerange alltogether, prices on those cards will not drop before ati brings out a capable competitor to it.neweggster - Thursday, January 26, 2006 - link
How hard would it be for this new series of cards by ATI to be optimized for all benchmarking softwares? Well ask yourself that, I just got done talking to a buddy of mine whos working out at MSI. I swear I freaked out when he said that ATI is using an advantage they found by optimizing the new R580's to work better with the newest benchmarking programs like 3Dmark 06 and such. I argued with him thats impossible, or is it? Please let me know, did ATI possibly use optimizations built into the new R580 cards to gain this advantage?Spoelie - Thursday, January 26, 2006 - link
how would validating die-space on a gpu for cheats make any sense? If there is any cheat it's in the drivers. And no, the only thing is that 3dmark06 needs 24bit DST's for its shadowing and that wasn't supported in the x1800xt (uses some hack instead) and it is supported now. Is that cheating? The x1600 and x1300 have support for this as well btw, and they came out at the same time as the x1800.Architecturally optimizing for one kind of rendering being called a cheat would make nvidia a really bad company for what they did with the 6x00/Doom3 engine. But noone is complaining about higher framerates in those situations now are they?
Regs - Thursday, January 26, 2006 - link
....Where in this article do you see a 3D Mark score?mi1stormilst - Thursday, January 26, 2006 - link
It is not impossible, but unless your friend works in some high level capacity I would say his comments at best are questionable. I don't think working in shipping will qualify him as an expert on the subject?coldpower27 - Wednesday, January 25, 2006 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2679...">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2679..."Notoriously demanding on GPUs, F.E.A.R. has the ability to put a very high strain on graphics hardware, and is therefore another great benchmark for these ultra high-end cards. The graphical quality of this game is high, and it's highly enjoyable to watch these cards tackle the F.E.A.R demo."
Wasn't use of this considered a bad idea as Nvidia cards have a huge performance penalty when used in this and the final buuld was supposed to be much better???
photoguy99 - Wednesday, January 25, 2006 - link
I noticed 1900x1440 is commonly benchmarked -Wouldn't the majority of people with displays in this range have 1920x1200 since that's what all the new LCDs are using? And it's the HD standard.
Aren't LCDs getting to be pretty capable game displays? My 24" Acer has a 6 ms (claimed) gray to gray response time, and can at least hold it's own.
Resolution for this monitor and almost all others this large: 1920x1200 - not 1920x1440.
Per Hansson - Wednesday, January 25, 2006 - link
Doing the math:Crossfire = 459w - 1900XTX = 341w = 118w, efficiency of PSU used@400w=78% so 118x0.78=92,04w
Per Hansson - Friday, January 27, 2006 - link
No replies huh? Cause I've read on other sites that the card draws upto 175w... Seems like quite a stretch so that was why I did the math to start with...