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
Battlefield 2 Performance
Battlefield 2 has been a standard for performance benchmarks here in the past, and it's probably one of our most important tests. This game still stands out as one of those making best use of the next generation of graphics hardware available right now due to its impressive game engine.
One of the first things to note here is something that is a theme throughout all of our performance tests in this review. In all our tests we find that the X1900 XTX and X1900 XT perform very similar to each other, and in some places differ only by a couple of frames per second. This is significant considering that the X1900 XTX costs about $100 more than the X1900 XT.
Below we have two sets of graphs for three different settings: no AA, 4xAA/8xAF, and maximum quality (higher AA and AF settings in the driver). Note that our benchmark for BF2 had problems with NVIDIA's sli so we were forced to omit these numbers. We can see how with and without AA, both ATI and NVIDIA cards perform very similar to each other on each side. Generally though, since ATI tends to do a little better with AA than NVIDIA, they hold a slight edge here. With the Maximum quality settings, we see a great reduction in performance which is expected. Something to keep in mind is that in the driver options, NVIDIA can enable AA up to 8X, while ATI can only enable up to 6X, so these numbers aren't directly comparable.
Battlefield 2 has been a standard for performance benchmarks here in the past, and it's probably one of our most important tests. This game still stands out as one of those making best use of the next generation of graphics hardware available right now due to its impressive game engine.
One of the first things to note here is something that is a theme throughout all of our performance tests in this review. In all our tests we find that the X1900 XTX and X1900 XT perform very similar to each other, and in some places differ only by a couple of frames per second. This is significant considering that the X1900 XTX costs about $100 more than the X1900 XT.
Below we have two sets of graphs for three different settings: no AA, 4xAA/8xAF, and maximum quality (higher AA and AF settings in the driver). Note that our benchmark for BF2 had problems with NVIDIA's sli so we were forced to omit these numbers. We can see how with and without AA, both ATI and NVIDIA cards perform very similar to each other on each side. Generally though, since ATI tends to do a little better with AA than NVIDIA, they hold a slight edge here. With the Maximum quality settings, we see a great reduction in performance which is expected. Something to keep in mind is that in the driver options, NVIDIA can enable AA up to 8X, while ATI can only enable up to 6X, so these numbers aren't directly comparable.
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Harkonnen - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Almost $900 CDN for the XTX and it only has a 1 year warranty?Main reason I would never buy an expensive ATi card is that right there.
smitty3268 - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
The people who buy a card this expensive the first day it comes out won't keep it for a whole year, so the warranty doesn't matter. In 6 months another card will be out that makes this one look slow and they'll be spending even more money.DerekWilson - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Due to popular demand, we have added more percent increase performance comparison graphs to the performance breakdown that shows the performance relatoinships at lower resolutions.Let us know if there is anything else you'd like to see. Thanks!
Live - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
The performance breakdown looks very good now! I would go so far as to say that this should be standard in future reviews.piroroadkill - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Using a lossy image format (JPEG) for image quality comparison screenshots seems kind of... pointless.But I guess you have to worry about bandwidth.
Josh Venning - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Thanks for the input all. Just to let you know we are dealing with some problems regarding our power numbers, but they should be up shortly. Thanks for being patient.Josh Venning - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
One more thing.. We also caught a mistype on the graphs that we are in the process of correcting. The two crossfire systems we tested are the X1900 XTX Crossfire and the X1800 XT Crossfire. (we miss-labeled the latter "X1900 XT Crossfire") Sorry for any confusion this may have caused.smitty3268 - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Ah... That makes much more sense now. I was wondering why the XTX crossfire was doing so much better than the XT crossfire when the specs were so similar.SpaceRanger - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
Problems with the publishing of them, or problems in the sense that it requires a direct link into a nuclear reactor to power properly??
DerekWilson - Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - link
our local nuclear plant ran us an extention cord just for this event :-)