X-bit labs

PowerColor Radeon X1800 GTO Graphics Card: the Best in Its Class? (page 7)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

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

Testbed and Methods

We tested PowerColor Radeon X1800 GTO in the following testbed:

• AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU (2.60GHz, 2x1MB L2 cache)
• ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe mainboard (Nvidia nForce4 SLI X16 chipset) for Nvidia GeForce graphics cards
• ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe mainboard (ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 chipset) for ATI Radeon graphics cards
• OCZ PC3200 Platinum EL DDR SDRAM (2 x 1GB, CL2-3-2-5)
• Maxtor MaXLine III 7B250S0 hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150, 16MB buffer)
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2 sound card
• Enermax Liberty 620W power supply (ELT620AWT, 620W)
• Dell P1130 and Dell P1110 monitors (21”, 1800x1440@75Hz max display mode)
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2 with DirectX 9.0c
• ATI Catalyst 6.4
• Nvidia ForceWare 84.21

We set up the ATI and Nvidia drivers in the same way as always:

ATI Catalyst:

• Catalyst A.I.: Standard
• Mipmap Detail Level: Quality
• Wait for vertical refresh: Always off
• Adaptive antialiasing: Off
• Temporal antialiasing: Off
• Quality AF: Off
• Other settings: default

Nvidia ForceWare:

• Image Settings: Quality
• Vertical sync: Off
• Trilinear optimization: On
• Anisotropic mip filter optimization: Off
• Anisotropic sample optimization: On
• Gamma correct antialiasing: On
• Transparency antialiasing: Off
• Other settings: default

We selected the highest graphics quality settings in each game, identical for graphics cards from ATI and Nvidia, except for the Pacific Fighters flight simulator that requires vertex texturing for its Shader Model 3.0 rendering mode. Radeon X1000 doesn’t support this feature therefore we ran the game in Shader Model 2.0 in this case. We did not edit the configuration files of the games. We also didn’t use the driver profiles optimized for given games. To measure the performance we either used the integrated tools of the games we tested in, or if there were none available, resorted to FRAPS utility. If it was possible, we measured minimal performance as well.

Since mainstream graphics cards do not always guarantee acceptable performance in contemporary games with enabled FSAA, we ran the tests not only with FSAA 4x + AF 16x, but also with FSAA disabled and only the highest level of anisotropic filtering activated.

We enabled FSAA and AF from the game if possible. Otherwise we forced the necessary mode from the ATI Catalyst and Nvidia ForceWare graphics card driver.

Besides Radeon X1800 GTO, we have also included the following graphics cards into our test session:

• Radeon X1900 XT (R580, 625/1450Mhz, 48pp, 8vp, 256-bit, 512MB)
  for details see our article called PowerColor X1900 XT Graphics Card Review
• Radeon X1800 XL 256MB (R520, 500/1000MHz, 16pp, 8vp, 256-bit, 256MB)
  for details see our article called Driven by the New Catalyst: Sapphire RADEON X1800 XL Review
• GeForce 7900 GT (G71, 450/1320MHz, 24pp, 8vp, 256-bit, 256MB)
  for details see our article called Nvidia GeForce 7900 GT Review
• GeForce 7600 GT (G73, 560/1400MHz, 12pp, 5vp, 128-bit, 256MB)

These games and applications were used as benchmarks:

First-Person 3D Shooters

• Battlefield 2
• The Chronicles of Riddick
• Call of Duty 2
• Doom III
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
• Far Cry
• F.E.A.R.
• Half-Life 2
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
• Project Snowblind
• Quake 4
• Serious Sam 2
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Third-Person 3D Shooters

• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Simulators

• Pacific Fighters
• X3: Reunion

Strategies

• Age of Empires 3
• Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War

Synthetic benchmarks

• Futuremark 3DMark05 build 1.2.0
• Futuremark 3DMark06 build 1.0.2