Rainbow Six: Vegas: A Performance Analysis
by Josh Venning on December 25, 2006 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Gaming
Mainstream/Midrange Performance
Rainbow Six: Vegas is a graphically intensive game, but as we said, we didn't have to play it at the highest resolution for it to look good. 1024x768 isn't a bad compromise to get a good balance of performance and graphics out of the game. When we step down to the midrange cards, this is really the most that any of these cards can handle at the higher detail settings. The X1650 XT is your best choice for playing this game at 1024x768 at the highest settings, but some overclocking might still be necessary. The slightly higher price of the X1650 XT (if you can find it right now) would still be a better choice for this game than the 7600 GT - its direct competitor from NVIDIA - because of the extra performance we see here.
Now let's look at how these cards perform with the same benchmark at the lower quality settings.
We can see that with NVIDIA, the amount of performance gain we generally see from turning the graphics quality settings down varies from around 40% to 45%. With ATI however, the performance gains are around 55% to 60%. This means obviously we'll have a better chance of picking up more performance and playing the game at a higher resolution with ATI cards by turning the quality settings down.
Rainbow Six: Vegas is a graphically intensive game, but as we said, we didn't have to play it at the highest resolution for it to look good. 1024x768 isn't a bad compromise to get a good balance of performance and graphics out of the game. When we step down to the midrange cards, this is really the most that any of these cards can handle at the higher detail settings. The X1650 XT is your best choice for playing this game at 1024x768 at the highest settings, but some overclocking might still be necessary. The slightly higher price of the X1650 XT (if you can find it right now) would still be a better choice for this game than the 7600 GT - its direct competitor from NVIDIA - because of the extra performance we see here.
Now let's look at how these cards perform with the same benchmark at the lower quality settings.
We can see that with NVIDIA, the amount of performance gain we generally see from turning the graphics quality settings down varies from around 40% to 45%. With ATI however, the performance gains are around 55% to 60%. This means obviously we'll have a better chance of picking up more performance and playing the game at a higher resolution with ATI cards by turning the quality settings down.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
32 Comments
View All Comments
ariafrost - Monday, December 25, 2006 - link
Well forget about running it on my X850XT, apparently RSV *requires* a Pixel Shader 3.0 video card. If anyone could confirm/deny that information it'd be great, but for now it looks like a lot of ill-informed customers may end up buying a game their "128MB/256MB" video cards can't support.justly - Monday, December 25, 2006 - link
Anandtech always seems to have a problem when ever it can't recomend NVIDIA as the best solution in every senerio. What is so wrong with the idea that ATI hardware performs better than NVIDIA hardware of the same generation? Maybe I'm mistaken, but I thought even Anandtech expected ATI might do better in newer games.
Personally I'm not much of a gamer so it really doesn't matter to me, but fot the sake of the people using your articles to choose hardware why give them expectations that might not materialize?
Maybe because I am not engrosed in the gamming experiance I have a different perspective, but considering a lot of games are ported over from consoles (or at least designed with consoles in mind) wouldn't it be reasonable to expect any game designed around a console using ATI graphics to favor ATI graphics on the PC? It wouldn't surprize me in the least to see games favoring (or at least more competitive) on hardware built around ATI for the next year or two.
Jodiuh - Monday, December 25, 2006 - link
Because it's happened before. Remember Oblivion?munky - Monday, December 25, 2006 - link
Nothing happened. The 7-series still has much worse performance in Oblivion in outdoor scenes with foliage than equivalent Ati cards.http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/nvidia_geforce...">http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/nvidia_geforce...
Frumious1 - Monday, December 25, 2006 - link
Try not to be so easily offended, Justly. I think the point Anandtech was trying to make is that they hope the performance gap can be reduced somewhat with driver/game updates. There are other games where NVIDIA outperforms ATI, but overall the 7900 GTX offers similar performance to the X1900 XT and not too much worse than the X1950 XT/XTX cards (I think). Another way of looking at this is that perhaps they just hope SM3 support doesn't turn into a GeForce FX fiasco again.So far, looks to me like ATI has better shader hardware. Ever read any of the stuff on the folding at home forums by their programmers? Basically, they have stated that G70 really has poor performance on their SM3 code even with optimizations... and it doesn't even look like G80 will be all that great. All that said, I still don't like ATI's drivers. CCC(P) is so sluggish it's pathetic, and that's after performance improvements since it first cam out.
jediknight - Monday, December 25, 2006 - link
I was hoping to see some of the last gen cards (err.. now with the 8800, I guess two gens old..) - as that's what I'm running with (with no hope of upgrading - as I'm with AGP right now.. )Specifically, if future reviews would consider the performance of the X800XL running at 1280x1024, I'll be happy :->
Spoelie - Monday, December 25, 2006 - link
you need to have a SM3 card to play this game, as such, it won't even start on your card.not that I agree with that policy, they should have provided a SM2 path, not everybody has a ~1/1.5 years old card.
jkostans - Monday, December 25, 2006 - link
I think its pretty clear you'll be needing to run at 800x600 with med graphics, or 1024x768 with low graphics settings in order to get around 20 fps.Tanclearas - Monday, December 25, 2006 - link
At 1600 x 1200, the 7900GTX runs at 19.8 and the X1950XTX runs at 20.4 FPS. Given those numbers, the above quote doesn't really make much sense. Did I miss something?
And just so people don't think I'm whining, or a fanboy, or whatever, I have an X1900XT (512MB). I am just honestly confused by the conclusion that the X1950XTX could handle 1600 x 1200 and the 7900GTX could not.
Josh Venning - Monday, December 25, 2006 - link
Thanks for the comment. The paragraph has been tweaked a little so that it's a little more clear. The fact is that both the X1950 XTX and 7900 GTX at reference speeds experience a little choppiness in the game at the highest resolution and quality settings. With some overclocking, either of these cards could run the game at these settings smoothly. Sorry for the confusion.