Performance in Simulators

Colin McRae Rally 2005

Smoke, dust from under the wheels, sun flares on the polished sides of rally cars – that’s Colin McRae Rally 2005 and its pixel-shader-heavy game engine.

The title is substantially limited by CPU performance in low resolutions, which is why no performance advantage of dual-GPU configurations may be observed. In 1600x1200, however, it is clear that the dual GeForce 7800 GTX is the absolute champ, whereas the GeForce 7800 GT is about 3 fps behind the RADEON X850 XT PE. In fact, this seems to one of a few games so far, where ATI’s top-of-the-range product may compete with much more affordable offering from NVIDIA.

With eye-candy on the GeForce 7800 GT, to our surprise, appeared to be much behind ATI’s RADEON X850 XT PE. Still, it managed to deliver truly great performance.