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

Antialiasing Performance

We also tested a couple of these games with 4xAA enabled in order to see how well the X1650 XT deals with AA. Antialiasing is something that is interesting to talk about, and is generally a tool for cleaning up the in-game picture. AA softens edges in a 3D environment, and hides the jaggies that can sometimes appear along them. One of the oddities about AA is that it's more important and effective when gaming at lower resolutions, which is going to be more of a necessity on low-end cards. This creates a dilemma because AA can create a significant performance hit when enabled. We find it's generally better to increase the resolution rather than use AA, but this will vary depending on user preference.

AA is a good solution for people with LCD panels that don't go above 1280x1024, in which case AA would be the only way to increase the graphical quality of a game. Also for those who don't have enough horsepower to move up to a higher resolution, turning on a little AA might be a way to get a little better image quality. Some gamers out there are just plain addicted to AA, but for lower end and mainstream parts the performance isn't always there. Let's see how things stack up.






Something that jumps out at us here is that the X1650 XT got slightly better performance at the highest resolution than the 7600 GT in both of these games with 4xAA enabled. Without AA enabled, the 7600 GT did better than the X1650 XT in these games. The amount of difference between the performance of both of these cards is about the same with and without AA at 1920x1440. Without AA enabled the 7600 GT generally performs a few frames better across resolutions in Battlefield 2; with AA enabled the X1650 XT generally performs a few frames better. This is interesting but makes sense when we consider that ATI generally performs better with AA enabled than NVIDIA does.