X-bit labs

PowerColor X1950 Pro SCS3 Graphics Card: The Big and The Silent (page 8)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

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

F.E.A.R. Extraction Point

Having only 12 TMUs and 12 ROPs clocked at 575MHz, the PowerColor X1950 Pro SCS3 cannot compete with the Radeon X1900 XT or GeForce 7950 GT, yet it is about 10% ahead of the GeForce 7900 GS and easily beats the new-generation GeForce 8600 GTS.

Creating its new mainstream graphics card Nvidia wanted to make it simple and cheap, so it came out with only 32 shader processors, 16 TMUs, 8 ROPs, and a 128-bit memory bus. As a result, it is inferior to the 0.08-micron ATI/AMD RV570 chip in every parameter save for the clock rate. No wonder then that the GeForce 8600 GTS is beaten by the Radeon X1950 Pro in most gaming tests.

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter

Using the deferred rendering technique, this game is incompatible with full-screen antialiasing. There are only anisotropic filtering results here.

The PowerColor X1950 Pro SCS3 is not particularly fast, but it never drops its speed below 25fps as the GeForce 8600 GTS does. So, you can play the game on the PowerColor, but not with the highest comfort possible. But at least you won’t have slowdowns that occur when the game speed bottoms out to below 25fps.