Performance in Simulators

Pacific Fighters

The engine of this game was originally oriented towards the GeForce 6 and 7 architectures and Nvidia’s cards have always been and remain superior to Radeon X1000 series products in this test. Even so, you can play this game in 1280x1024 with enabled FSAA and anisotropic filtering on the GeCube Radeon X1900 XTX. You should be aware that you can’t get the best-quality water surface in this game because none of Radeon X1000 series chips supports vertex texturing. This has been a prerogative of GeForce 6/7 series cards so far.

X3: Reunion

X3: Reunion continues the glorious space sim series from Egosoft. The game features more detailed and special-effects-richer visuals than we saw in X2: The Threat , although it still does not use complex version 3.0 shaders. Anyway, this is a heavy application for the graphics subsystem and is a good benchmark, too. Let’s see what speed modern high-end graphics cards can provide in the new space simulator. Can you get a high-quality picture by turning on full-screen antialiasing?

Nvidia’s cards are slower than ATI Radeon X1900 and even X1800-based products. There is also no difference between the GeForce 7900 GTX, GeForce 7800 GTX 512 and GeForce 7900 GT despite the considerable dissimilarities in the tech specs of these cards. It must be due to some features of the game engine. In higher resolutions the GeForce 7900 GT feels the lack of memory bandwidth and falls behind the senior GeForce 7 models.

The GeCube Radeon X1900 XTX, Radeon X1900 XT and Radeon X1800 XT rank up in the order of descending performance, but the latter isn’t far behind the R580-based products that feature 48 pixel processors. It means there are not as many math1ematical instructions in the game’s pixel shaders as to load fully all the extra units in the R580 chip. The GeCube Radeon X1900 XTX ensures a high enough frame rate in all resolutions, including 1600x1200.