X-bit labs

PowerColor Radeon X1800 GTO Graphics Card: the Best in Its Class? (page 22)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 06/01/2006 | 12:24 AM ]

Performance in Strategies

Age of Empires 3

Despite wide use of SM3.0 and HDR in this game, PowerColor X1800 GTO unfortunately yields to GeForce 7600 GT. Only overclocking helps improve this situation and only if we enable FSAA 4x. We cannot explain this phenomenon. Since there are a lot of shader effects, the game favors solutions with numerous pixel processors, however, Radeon X1800 GTO and GeForce 7600 GT feature the same number of pixel processors. Moreover, the difference in core frequencies is not big enough to cause ATI’s lagging behind here. These could be the Catalyst drivers, or some architectural peculiarities of the R520 processor.

Speaking of the mainstream solutions’ performance, we can state that it is not that high in SM3.0 mode with highest graphics quality settings. We can only detect relatively high average results in 1024x768 resolution.

Warhammer 40.000: Dawn of War

Unlike the previous game, the defeat of PowerColor X1800 GTO in Dawn of War is quite logical, because of the game engine peculiarities: it uses a lot of stencil shadows and at the same time is limited by DirectX 8.0. Nevertheless, the performance of our main hero is high enough to offer comfortable gaming in all resolutions with enabled anisotropic filtering.

Unfortunately, Radeon X1800 GTO cannot handle enabled FSAA at all. Even though the average performance in this case is around 50fps, the minimal fps rate is 20rps, which will result into noticeable jumps in those scenes that have a lot of action. So, you may not be able to control your troops efficiently during the gameplay.