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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tuteja1986 - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
wait for firing squad review then :) if you want AAx8beggerking - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Did anyone notice it? the breakdown graphs doesn't quite reflect the actual data..the breakdown is showing 1900xtx being much faster than 7800 512, but in the actual performance graph 1900xtx is sometimes outpaced by 7800 512..
SpaceRanger - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
All the second to last section describes in the Image Quality. There was no explaination on power consumtion at all. Was this an accidental omit or something else??Per Hansson - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Yes, please show us the power consumption ;-)A few things I would like seen done; Put a low-end PCI GFX card in the comp, boot it and register power consumption, leave that card in and then do your normal tests with a single X1900 and then dual so we get a real point on how much power they consume...
Also please clarify exactly what PSU was used and how the consumption was measured so we can figure out more accuratley how much power the card really draws (when counting in the (in)efficiency of the PSU that is...
peldor - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
That's a good idea on isolating the power of the video card.From the other reviews I've read, the X1900 cards are seriously power hungry. In the neighborhood of 40-50W more than the X1800XT cards. The GTX 512 (and GTX of course) are lower than the X1800XT, let alone the X1900 cards.
vaystrem - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Anyone else find this interesting??Battlefield 2 @ 2048x1536 Max Detail
7800GTX512 33FPS
AIT 1900XTX 32.9FPS
ATI 1900XTX Crossfire. 29FPS
-------------------------------------
Day of Defeat
7800GTX512 18.93FPS
AIT 1900XTX 35.5PS
ATI 1900XTX Crossfire. 35FPS
-------------------------------------
Fear
7800GTX512 20FPS
AIT 1900XTX 36PS
ATI 1900XTX Crossfire. 49FPS
-------------------------------------
Quake 4
7800GTX512 43.3FPS
AIT 1900XTX 42FPS
ATI 1900XTX Crossfire. 73.3FPS
DerekWilson - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Becareful here ... these max detail settings enabled superaa modes which really killed performance ... especially with all the options flipped on quality.we're working on getting some screens up to show the IQ difference. but suffice it to say that that the max detail settings are very apples to oranges.
we would have seen performance improvements if we had simply kept using 6xAA ...
DerekWilson - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
to further clarify, fear didn't play well when we set AA outside the game, so it's max quality ended up using the in game 4xaa setting. thus we see a performance improvement.for day of defeat, forcing aa/af through the control panel works well so we were able to crank up the quality.
I'll try to go back and clarify this in the article.
vaystrem - Wednesday, January 25, 2006 - link
I'm not sure how that justifies what happens. Your argument is that it is the VERY highest settings so that its ok for the 'dual' 1900xtx to have lower performance than a single card alternative? That doesn't seem to make sense and speaks poorly for the ATI implementation.Lonyo - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
The XTX especially in Crossfire does seem to give a fair boost in a number of tests over the XT and XT in Crossfire.