Far Cry

Like it could have been expected, the PowerColor X1900 GT isn’t any faster than the Radeon X1800 XL on the Pier level and is even slower in 1024x768. This comes from the specifics of the design of the test scene. The flight on a hang-glider means a vast field of vision and, accordingly, an increased textural load. In the higher resolutions the PowerColor card does better due to its high GPU/memory frequencies. It equals the GeForce 7900 GT here.

The overclocking adds more vigor to the card but it still cannot reach the level of the Radeon X1800 XT 512MB. This is not a problem for this rather undemanding game, however. Even at its default frequencies the Radeon X1900 GT allows playing Far Cry with comfort using 1600x1200 resolution, full-screen antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.

The new card is better than the Radeon X1800 XL. Like in the previous case, its performance is high enough for you to use FSAA and anisotropic filtering in 1600x1200 resolution. The rest of the participating cards deliver comfortable performance, too.

We’ve got interesting results in the game’s HDR mode. The Radeon X1900 GT isn’t impressive in 1024x768, being a mere 5fps ahead of the Radeon X1800 XL, but after that it suddenly soars up to the level of the Radeon X1800 XT 512MB. The triumph didn’t last long, however, as in 1600x1200 the PowerColor X1900 GT is again closer to the Radeon X1800 XL, probably because it has less of graphics memory than the Radeon X1800 XT 512MB. Well, none of the participating graphics cards provides even a minimum of comfort in this resolution.

The new card behaves in a similar way when we turn on HDR on the Research map. Despite the inefficient implementation of this mode for Radeon X1000 cards in the current version of Far Cry, the PowerColor allows playing in 1280x1024 while the Radeon X1800 XL doesn’t. Note that you can have a comfortable frame rate on the GeForce 7900 GT in 1280x1024 resolution in the HDR mode.