X-bit labs

PowerColor X1950 Pro SCS3 Graphics Card: The Big and The Silent (page 13)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 05/23/2007 | 12:10 PM ]

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

The game looks much worse without HDR (although this is an arguable point), so we test it with enabled FP HDR.

The PowerColor X1950 Pro SCS3 does well here: it is quite possible to play TES IV at 47fps with slowdowns to 25fps, although some reserve of speed would be welcome. This reserve is provided by the Radeon X1900 XT with its 48 pixel processors, each of which consists of 4 ALUs, and by the GeForce 7950 GT with its 24 TMUs.

The PowerColor X1950 Pro SCS3 loses its ground suddenly in the open game scenes, losing to the GeForce 8600 GTS. The latter even outperforms the Radeon X1900 XT in low resolutions. The unified architecture that can flexibly distribute the GPU’s computing resources between pixel and vertex shaders seems to work well here. Besides, the number of TMUs and ROPs is not important for 1280x1024 resolution, which contributes to the good performance of the new mainstream card from Nvidia.

Unfortunately, owners of graphics cards with the previous-generation architectures in which shader processors are divided into pixel and vertex ones cannot avoid having slowdowns in this game. This concerns even gaming platforms with an AMD Radeon X1900 XT.