ATI Radeon X1950 Pro: CrossFire Done Right

Battlefield 2 Performance

This benchmark is performed using DICE's built in demo playback functionality with a few added extras built in house. When using the built in demo playback features of BF2, frames rendered during the loading screen are counted in the benchmark. In order to get a real idea of performance, we use the instantaneous frametime and frames per second data generated from a benchmark run. We discard the data collected during the loading screen and calculate a result that represents the actual gameplay that was benchmarked. While DICE maintains that results over 100fps aren't reliable, our methods have allowed us to get useful data from high performing systems.

During the benchmark, the camera switches between players and vehicles in order to capture the most action possible. There is a lot of smoke and explosions, so this is a very GPU intensive Battlefield 2 benchmark. The game itself is best experienced with average in-game framerates of 35 and up.

We ran Battlefield 2 using the highest quality graphics settings we could. Shadows, lighting, and especially view distance are very important in order to best play the game. In our opinion view distance should never be set to less than the max, but other settings can be decreased slightly if a little more performance or a higher resolution is required.  

Its ability to offer 7900 GT levels of performance at the price of a 7900 GS makes the Radeon X1950 Pro quite a deal. The added memory speed gives the X1950 Pro a good advantage over the X1900 GT here. Of course, when the new handicapped X1900 GT comes along, expect this gap to widen. X1950 Pro CrossFire offers performance levels on par with X1900/X1950 XTX under BF2 without AA enabled. This puts it in competition with the 7900 GTX and offers much better performance than the 7950 GT. All what we would expect from $400 of graphics card. Interestingly, NVIDIA's 7900 GS SLI is able to offer better performance than X1950 Pro CrossFire in spite of the single card performance advantage the later maintains. This indicates that SLI scales much better than CrossFire under these conditions.  

With 4xAA enabled, the X1950 Pro performs even better compared to the competition. CrossFire, however, doesn't give any more of a boost in comparison to X1900/X1950 XTX or 7900 GS SLI than we saw without AA. The X1950 Pro is an excellent choice as a single card solution, but for multi-GPU users, SLI is still a better bet.