ATI's New High End and Mid Range: Radeon X1950 XTX & X1900 XT 256MB
by Derek Wilson on August 23, 2006 9:52 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Black & White 2 Performance
The AnandTech benchmark for Black & White 2 is a FRAPS benchmark. Between the very first tutorial land and the second land there is a pretty well rounded cut scene rendered in-game. This benchmark is indicative of real world performance in Black & White 2. We are able to see many of the commonly rendered objects in action. The most stressful part of the benchmark is a scene where hundreds of soldiers come running over a hill, which really pounds the geometry capabilities of these cards. At launch, ATI cards were severely out matched when it came to B&W2 performance because of this scene, but two patches applied to the game and quite a few Catalyst revisions later give ATI cards a much needed boost in performance over what we first saw.
A desirable average framerate for Black & White 2 is anything over 20 fps. The game does remain playable down to the 17-19 fps range, but we usually start seeing the occasional annoying hiccup during gameplay here. While this isn't always a problem as far as getting things done and playing the game, any jerkiness in frame rate degrades the overall experience.
We did test with all the options on the highest quality settings under the custom menu. Antialiasing has quite a high performance hit in this game, and is generally not worth it at high resolutions unless the game is running on a super powerhouse of a graphics card. If you're the kind of person who just must have AA enabled, you'll have to settle for a little bit lower resolution than we tend to like on reasonably priced graphics card. Black & White 2 is almost not worth playing at low resolutions without AA, depth of field, or bloom enabled. At that point, we tend to get image quality that resembles the original Black & White. While various people believe that the original was a better game, no one doubts the superiority of B&W2's amazing graphics.
So far things aren't looking good for ATI's multi-GPU solution making its way to the top of the charts, as the 7900 GTX SLI significantly outperforms the X1950 CrossFire setup. Once again, we see that the X1950 CrossFire is barely faster than a single 7950 GX2 but, to ATI's credit, Black & White 2 has never been a strength of the X1000 series.
Single card performance is a bit closer, as the 7900 GTX offers the same performance as the X1950 XTX. Although the 7950 GX2 is technically a single card, its dual GPUs let it perform like a multi-card solution, and its price shows. The 7950 GX2 offers an interesting middle ground between the price and performance of a top of the line single GPU solution like the X1950 XTX or 7900 GTX and a full blown multi-card multi-GPU setup.
Once again it's worth noting that even the $280 X1900 XT 256MB is able to average a playable frame rate at 2048 x 1536, making a case for the value to be had in a sub-$300 graphics card.
With AA enabled, the X1950 CrossFire vs. 7900 GTX SLI gap narrows considerably, and on the single card side the X1950 XTX manages to outperform the 7900 GTX. Thanks to better scaling with NVIDIA's SLI, the 7900 GTX more than makes up for the gap when you add a second card.
With 4X AA enabled, the X1900 XT 256MB can no longer hang with the big boys. However, it's worth mentioning that at higher resolutions, the visual benefit of anti-aliasing quickly diminishes. As pixel size decreases, visible aliasing becomes much less of a problem and if it's bothering you that much at 2048 x 1536 we may need to sit you down and have a talk about the old days when we didn't have anti-aliasing (and we had to benchmark in the snow).
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JarredWalton - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
Anisotropic filtering was enabled in all tests at 8xAF as far as I know. When we use antialiasing, we generally enable anisotropic filtering as well.LoneWolf15 - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
Looks like there's no HDCP support or HDMI connector added like I'd expect with a brand new top-end card. And, they didn't add the new quieter cooler to the X1900XT. Pity. I doubt it would cost ATI more, and it'd up the sale of cards since people hate the noisy fan ATI has been currently using.I'll pass. My older (by alpha-geek standards) X800XL does the job fine.
P.S. -1 for not doing any bench tests with Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.
DerekWilson - Saturday, August 26, 2006 - link
also, all of these cards have HDCP support -- which I believe I mentioned somewhere in there. HDMI is up to the vendor.JarredWalton - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
+2 You might want to read page 8.LoneWolf15 - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
I don't know what's going on, I must have been blind. My apologies there, Jarred.Dfere - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
You just can't always eat your cake and then have it left over.YOu should change your phrase from "Sometimes we can have our cake and eat it too"
to "Sometimes we can eat our cake and have it too"
poohbear - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
the established exnglish expression is "you cant have your cake and eat it too", even if it doesnt make logical sense. There are many words and expressions that dont make sense in english (driveway, football, highway). Im guessing you're not a native english speaker, but that's the way the language is. now, please post about technology and not the logic of english expressions.Griswold - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
Whats wrong with football? Or do you mean american "football"?poohbear - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
can anyone confirm if those power consumption tests are for the entire system or just the vid cards? the highest figure was 267wts: a high end system that consumes 267wts underload is sweet! can you confirm that is indeed for the entire system (cpu, mobo, hdd, vid card... everything). thanks.JarredWalton - Thursday, August 24, 2006 - link
I'm pretty sure that this is power use for the entire system, but Derek's results are quite a bit lower than what I got on the ABS system I tested last week for X1900 CrossFire. Of course, the water cooling and extra fans on the ABS system might add a decent amount of power draw, and I don't know how "loaded" the systems are in this test. I would guess that Derek ran Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory for load conditions.