X-bit labs

Silence of the Radeon HD 2600: Gigabyte GV-RX26T256H Graphics Card Review (page 10)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 11/19/2007 | 11:51 PM ]

Prey

Prey and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars used a modified game engine from Doom 3, so there is no fundamental difference between the two tests. The ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT is slow in both cases even at a resolution of 1280x1024.

Although the Gigabyte is ahead of the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT in Prey, you surely have to disable FSAA or special effects to achieve a playable speed. You may even have to buy a more expensive card for that.

If you’ve already got an ATI Radeon X1950 Pro, there is no sense in replacing it with newer solutions from the same class. The card is faster than DirectX 10-compatible solutions priced at $149 across a number of applications.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl

The game doesn’t support FSAA when you enable the dynamic lighting model, but loses much of its visual appeal with the static model. This is the reason why we benchmarked the cards in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. using anisotropic filtering only.

The resource-consuming lighting model employed in this game is a problem for more advanced cards than the Gigabyte GV-RX26T256H. You’ll either have to disable it or use a faster card. Once again we can note the high performance of the ATI Radeon X1950 Pro and Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS.