X-bit labs

PowerColor X1950 Pro SCS3 Graphics Card: The Big and The Silent (page 15)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

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

Performance in Strategies

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

The game having a frame rate limiter, you should consider the min speeds of the cards in the first place. This parameter determines your playing comfort in Command & Conquer 3.

The GeForce 7950 GT with 24 TMUs clocked at 550MHz is in the lead in terms of minimum speed, but the PowerColor X1950 Pro SCS3 is sufficiently fast, too, in 1280x1024. The Radeon X1900 XT performs oddly: having a rather low minimum speed, it hits against the frame limiter even in 1920x1200, outperforming the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB along the way.

Company of Heroes

We tested the game in the pure speed mode with enabled anisotropic filtering only, because it has problems when you turn on FSAA.

The PowerColor X1950 Pro SCS3 is somewhat faster than the GeForce 8600 GTS, but that’s in fact all the good news. The speed of 38fps with terrible slowdowns to 9fps is not comfortable at all. As we already know from our article called Fast and Faster: MSI GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB vs. GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB, the game is very fastidious about the amount of graphics memory. This must be the reason why the PowerColor is lagging so far behind the Radeon X1900 XT 512MB.

Supreme Commander

The PowerColor delivers good performance (for its class) in Supreme Commander. In 1280x1024 – the most popular resolution for owners of such graphics cards – the X1950 Pro SCS3 is only slower than the Radeon X1900 XT. In 1600x1200 and 1920x1200 it is 12-14% behind the GeForce 7950 GT, but this is hardly important because their frame rates are too low.